Where Do We Go From Here? From Tyranny to Collapse, Part 5

By Steven Yates

From Tyranny to Collapse

“The wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt. It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are mortally hurt. People talk about the impatience of the populace; but sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late. It is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists.” ― G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State (1922)

Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4.

[Author’s Note: I had originally intended to conclude this series with this installment. The amount of material still needing to be covered would have resulted in an impossibly long and unwieldy article, however. Hence some of my discussion will be deferred to a Part 6, forthcoming in a week to ten days after this appears.]

The Global Corporatocracy (GloboCorp) may not get all that it wants over the next several years, but it will surely get some of what it wants. Maybe a great deal of what it wants. It already has. We should have read G.K. Chesterton long ago!

What does GloboCorp want? Control, through fear and technocracy. If we’ve learned anything over the past year, it’s how easily those with the know-how can create and use fear. One of the best means of inducing fear is mass media repeating ghastly images or sequences over and over incessantly. Think of the collapsing towers on 9/11, shown over and over again. Or context-free death numbers from Covid-19.

As for technocracy:we have seen increasing use of mass surveillance and policies involving what we could call the encirclement method (systemic coercion is another term for the process). In this method, no one puts a gun to your head. Instead, directives are drawn up in corporate board rooms in consultation with the political class and lawyers schooled in circumventing the law. Research on what nudges the masses was done decades ago, bankrolled by foundations such as Rockefeller. Appropriate incentives/disincentives are put in place. Media mouthpieces promote what is wanted nonstop, messaging that compliance brings safety and well-being. The peasants are steered into desired mass behaviors. Noncompliance brings inconvenience.

Where I live, security people — on the ground enforcers, one might call them — monitor temperature checkpoints at all bank, mall, and grocery store entrances, and compel you to accept hand spray. I have yet to see anyone refuse. If we are officially “in quarantine,” they demand to see a permission slip (obtained online) that has your name, ID number, home address, age, destination(s), etc. It allows you three hours. You can save it in your phone, in which case, monitoring is even easier. You are allowed two of these per week.

Inside any mall or store, one sees social distancing instructions everywhere, even arrows on floors where to walk. The sheeple comply without question. This is the “new normal.” Where my wife and I have lived for several months now, no one I know of gives any of this a second thought.

Incidentally, anyone believing such measures can’t be or won’t be expanded to require vaccination info is kidding himself.

Big Pharma, a key division of GloboCorp, has already made billions off the new mRNA vaccines, remaining indemnified against any long term harm they do. This in addition to the population control vaccine info makes possible. Neither was possible with HCQ/zinc or Ivermectin. Hence the suppression of those cures for Covid-19 while thousands died, and disinformation by GloboCorp-bought agencies such as the FDA.

And as viruses mutate (we now hear of more dangerous strains of Covid), forcing the peasants to get annual booster shots will be as easy as putting expiration dates on drivers’ licenses and credit cards. One line of code will do it, and if your immunity passport expires, it’s no different than if you’re an untouchable refusenik.

Billions more to Big Pharma, while GloboCorp tightens its noose on the world.

One question before us is whether these instruments, collectively, can strangle conservative communities. The answer is that if those in them cannot feed, clothe, and house themselves, supply the bulk of their own energy, etc., then of course they can! Not to mention mass media demonizing them as hotbeds of “white supremacism,” etc. Conservatives trying to separate from GloboCorp controls could be labeled “potential domestic terrorists” even if they are keeping to themselves and threatening no one.

I am assuming, of course, that the majority remain U.S.-based. I can certify that moving abroad is not a panacea. The obvious reason: GloboCorp, by definition, is global. Its tendrils reach everywhere. All you have to do, to determine if GloboCorp is present in a country is ask whether that country has a central bank.

I’ve said that conservatives have three options: submit to tyranny, revolt, or form free and separate communities. The first two are out. The third is iffy at best. Many just won’t have the necessary mindset and skills.

I’ve hinted at aces in the hole, leading to the idea that our best bet is to gain whatever independence from GloboCorp’s systems as we can (this is not all or nothing, after all), and prepare to wait this out. Wait for what?

For collapse.

Because if we learn anything from studying the history of empires, it is that sooner or later, they fall from within. GloboCorp may be the largest, wealthiest (digitally, at least), and most powerful empire in history, but it will not escape basic structural realities that dictate that all empires eventually collapse. Without exception.

Collapse refers to a process, not a single dramatic event like in a science fiction movie — although relatively sudden, destructive calamities (especially financial meltdowns) are not impossible and actually likely. It is probable, moreover, that an industrial-technological system really is fundamentally parasitic on its surrounding environment, having to extract and eventually depleting available nonrenewable resources. The primary resource of Anglospheric influence has been oil (natural gas being secondary). Hence the foreign wars fought not for “democracy” as the propaganda mills asserts but for control over as much as possible of the world’s remaining oil supply, with economic destruction visited upon nations which try to kick GloboCorp out without getting self-reliant first. Venezuela is the obvious example.

Talk of collapse is in the air. It is no longer limited to “the fringes.” Serious scholarship has appeared on the looming collapse of the U.S. economic-militaristic empire, some by foreign observers, some by Americans. If the U.S. goes down, GloboCorp doesn’t simply move to China. Other nation states will survive, of course, but no one else has either the aspirations or the reach of what has existed in the Anglosphere all these years. (If something happens to the U.S., China loses its biggest overseas market. They know it, too; which is why the CCP is scrambling to socially engineer a consumer society; and it is interesting to watch them do it with no pretenses whatever of “liberal democracy.”)

Civilizations have life spans just as persons do. They are born, experience vigorous growth, and rise to maturity. Then they derail, little by little. They become complacent; their people become spoiled and entitled. They forget their founding principles, and the work that went into their society’s rise. Unhealthy egotism replaces the spirit of the enterprise-builders of old. Inertia, short-term thinking, and decadence set in. A ruling elite clings to wealth and power while the rest of society fragments. Living standards fall. People turn inwards as crime and corruption accelerate and the world around them goes to pieces.

If tyranny happens in what was once a republic, it happens at this point, as the elites crack down to force people to behave, and to reestablish order. It doesn’t last, as people flee if they can, and engage in passive resistance of they cannot. Living standards and basic morality fall further. At some point, someone at the helm drops the ball and the tyranny collapses (or is “sacked” from the outside).

At its end, the empire’s capitol city may remain, as with Rome, but the empire is gone. History discloses many examples of fallen empires of various sorts. Napoleon’s empire died with him. The Hapsburgs fell. So did the Ottomans. The British had vast overseas holdings based on economic prowess — lost after the Second World War. The Kremlin lost its empire.

Can Americans honestly look at their present-day military-security complex, bloated federal bureaucracies and skyrocketing public debt, and believe their fate to be different?

Oswald Spengler became the first major collapse theorist with The Decline of the West (1923). Carroll Quigley, the pre-eminent macro historian of his generation, was trying to answer Spengler. Most people don’t realize this because they read Tragedy and Hope (1966) without reading his earlier The Evolution of Civilizations (1961).

Spengler thought collapse was inevitable. Quigley wanted to convince readers that globally-minded financial-business elites and the intellectuals surrounding them could turn collapse back. That was the hope. He believed them benign, but because of the degree of control they would wield, especially the kind of control I’ve used the term encirclement to describe, refuseniks would only hang themselves. That would be the tragedy. H.G. Wells expressed this eloquently a quarter century before:

“… when the struggle seems to be drifting definitely towards a world social democracy, there may still be very great delays and disappointments before it becomes an efficient and beneficent world system. Countless people … will hate the new world order … and will die protesting against it. When we attempt to evaluate its promise, we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents, many of them quite gallant and graceful-looking people.” H.G. Wells, The New World Order (1940)

Wells and Quigley saw the “new world order” as the inevitable product of an Enlightenment-based civilization. Purveyors of “The Great Reset” are not saying anything fundamentally new. All that has changed is the technological gadgetry.

The more things change, though, the more human nature stays the same. The Grand Illusion of Enlightenment rationalism is that given time, it can change human nature and bring about a scientific-technocratic utopia, not the dystopia GloboCorpglobal governance presently heralds.

I’ve written of Sir John Bagot Glubb, author of the relatively short tracts “The Fate of Empires” and “Search for Survival” (see my discussions here, here, and here). He saw empires as proceeding according to the following stages:

Outburst and Age of Pioneers.
Age of Conquest.
Age of Commerce.
Age of Affluence.
Age of Intellect.
Age of Decadence.

The last stage, which presages collapse, has some or most of the following characteristics:

Professional intellectuals are either cosmic pessimists or have escaped into microspecialization or ideological fairy tales.
Religious institutions are weakened; many are rife with scandals of their own, such as those of the Catholic Church.
Education stops, replaced by job skills training; attention spans shorten; critical thinking goes into total eclipse.
Society’s moral compass is lost, replaced by material wealth as the gold standard of success.
Hedonism surges; the young adopt an eat, drink, and be merry spirit (those who aren’t suicidal).
Cultural heroes are sports stars and brainless celebrities, as opposed to the statesmen and real achievers of yesteryear.
Both liberal politicians and corporate CEOs promote unlimited immigration, with immigrants not assimilatingor learning English. Politicians want votes; CEOs want cheap labor. No one sees long term consequences.
Marriage as an institution declines. As families disintegrate, populations of single adults explode, along with out-of-wedlock births. Boys grow up fatherless, especially in minority communities. Women enter the workforce often out of economic necessity and move into professions previously dominated by men. Neither sex trusts the other. “Dating” becomes an emotional and spiritual minefield.Birthrates fall.
Public willingness to live at the expense of an increasingly bloated, bureaucratic welfare state grows, often from a mixture of entitlement and cynicism (“the system screwed me; now it owes me!”)
Sex in all varieties becomes an ever-present obsession; marketers employ what they can get away with; professional entertainers cannot speak three sentences without sexual or scatological references.

Those were Glubb’s, elaborated somewhat; in light of decades following his contribution I embellished further:

We see foreign wars and lies about them, with further threats (many of them postures, as America’s military capability is in decline).
Production is replaced by financialization, increasingly irrational fiscal and monetary policies based on the illusion that the Federal Reserve can print its way out of any crisis.
The rich get richer gaming “the system”while everyone else loses ground; inequality widens until it threatens instability; there is abundant evidence that “the system” redistributes wealth upward. The lockdowns have accelerated this process with billionaires having increased their wealth by almost 30 percent during the past year.
One sees evidence (noted in Part 4) that those in power say and do what they believe they can get away with. This now includes stealing an election in full view and then furiously denying they’ve done it, calling truth-tellers “liars” to be destroyed by lawfare (lawsuits designed to punish) or labeled “conspiracy theorists” and dishonestly lumped with QAnon loons.
This includes obvious double-standards: Antifa can take over or destroy portions of cities (Seattle and Portland) for weeks without legal consequence and be labeled, incoherently, “an IDEA”; conservatives protest at the Capitol for ONE DAY,and are hunted down like animals if they breached the Capitol or fired from their jobs if they are identified as having been in the vicinity.

Dmitry Orlov outlined Five Stages of Collapse. His claim to speak with some authority comes from his having been present in the Soviet Union, boots on the ground, 1989-91, witnessing the Soviet collapse first-hand.

Orlov’s Five Stages (reordered from his original statements as he acknowledges that because of structural differences between the two empires, U.S. collapse is proceeding in almost the reverse of what he’d seen in the Soviet Union:

(1) cultural collapse (including, I presume, educational collapse);

(2) social collapse;

(3) commercial collapse;

(4) political collapse;

(5) financial collapse.

In cultural collapse, the ties that bind a people together basically die—or are killed off. Or as Orlov puts it, “faith in the goodness of humanity is lost.” Cult of Woke controlled “education” and mass media have largely accomplished this.

In social collapse, trust among people as fellow citizens disintegrates. Neighbors no longer know one another and therefore do not look out for one another.

In commercial collapse, confidence in markets is lost. Lockdowns have now destroyed hundreds of thousands of small businesses, and are finishing the controlled demolition of middle classes everywhere, leaving a two-tiered system of the ruling elite and disempowered peasants told to look to “their” government for “stimulus money.”

We saw the fruits of political collapse on November 3-4, 2020, and in the aftermath.

Financial collapse has not yet occurred. But consider: the national debt has reached $28 trillion; total federal liabilities are at least $80 trillion (does anyone know for sure how high they go?). Most have accumulated since the roaring ‘90s, and indications are, debt will continue to rise geometrically.

No one serious believes this can continue forever, even if Modern Monetary Policy says so, and even if we don’t have a timeline or know in advance specific details of what is to come. Will it involve a hyperinflationary spiral or sudden deflation (or both)?

I don’t know.

What is interesting and ironic is that as money has been increasingly worshipped as a god by the haves and become just one huge encircling force circumscribing every aspect of the lives of the have-nots (and the remaining in-betweens), its value has plummetted. Fiat money always loses its purchasing power. Saving thus becomes a fool’s game. Thousands flock to dangerous forms of speculation (e.g., “cryptocurrencies”), dangerous if only because if you don’t know exactly what you are doing you can lose your shirt very fast! Your gains even then are from cleverness in timing and blind luck. While I’m no financial advisor, I don’t think it especially wise to trust in either one!

Conservatives with the right mindset ought to see all this as encouraging, not frightening. Ultimately, they are not the ones who will be hanging themselves. Globocorp’s systems are not sustainable in the original and highest sense of that term, and are doomed to collapse. The Klaus Schwabs of the world just don’t know it yet.

For there is an additional factor in collapse that Glubb didn’t think of (the evidence had not yet materialized), but Orlov has: oil depletion. Many conservatives will not like the idea that the environmentalists of yesteryear may have gotten something right: that you cannot have indefinite growth on a finite planet with finite resources.

Recently turning up during the unpacking after my wife and I moved last year were my old copies of James Howard Kunstler’s The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the 21^st Century (2005) and Michael C. Ruppert’s Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil (2004).

I gave both books a reread.

Together, they amass convincing evidence that industrialism is coming to an end, because the era of cheap oil is over.

Ruppert suggests that Globocorp has known this for decades. And what have they done with the information?

Remember that their self-assigned “prime directive” has been to maintain power, whatever the cost.

[To be continued in Part 6]

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com