by Higgenbotham » Thu Oct 22, 2026 5:06 pm
tim wrote: Thu Oct 22, 2026 8:29 am
The Hidden Looting by the Rich leads to the Physical Looting by Those Who've Been Looted
CHARLES HUGH SMITH
Those who aren’t delighted to further enrich the moneylenders in the temple with their labor quit in disgust, while those with zero scruples and limitless greed devote every waking hour to enriching the most avaricious few for their share of the loot.
I sit at one point on the wheel which gives one perspective on this.
My cohort turns 65 this year. I've talked pretty extensively here about what I call The 97th Percentile. In a high school class of 300, The 97th Percentile could ideally be characterized as those who ranked from roughly Position 4 through Position 15. They are those who do the work without question and strive to do the best job they can. You could spend somewhere between 4 and 12 years around these people and get a pretty good feel for who fits in at that level. If a teacher is an entitled goldbrick who teaches two classes while wasting oodles of taxpayer money, The 97th Percentile will fear, aid and abet him without question.
I'll get back to that in a minute.
So Tuesday I went to my daughter's school to pick her up. School started about the first of September. Tuesday, for the first time this year, I saw one of the grandparents of a girl who is in my daughter's class. He's a Business professor here and I would put him right around my age. We were both happy to catch up. He told me he's been spending a lot of time working on AI. Been very busy helping businesses integrate AI into the operations. Lots of work. Then he turned the topic to retirement. Doesn't know what he would do if he retired.
Now I will switch back to those previously mentioned who were in Positions 4 through 15 and discuss an observation. Once they graduated college, nobody ever heard from them. The reason is, I think, that those at The 97th Percentile in a professional capacity in this day and age barely have the time to keep up with the work and other demands that are being placed on them. From my observation, these people sort of disappear into this black hole of "professional employment" for decades. As they near retirement, they will pop their heads up and proclaim that fact. Then, one at a time, again, in my observation, once retired, they will post photos of themselves on Facebook, LinkedIn, or what have you of the golf clubs on their back or whatever. They look like hell and are not even recognizable vis a vis their younger selves but apparently in their minds they have made it and can now proclaim it to the world, warts and all. And, as I posted not too long ago, something like 93% of then will have at least one chronic condition.
That bring us to the point of the quote above from Charles Hugh Smith, "devote every waking hour to enriching the most avaricious few for their share of the loot."
This might sound a little harsh to some. It does to me. I mean, I know some of them are good people. At best, they probably didn't intend for their actions to produce that result. But that is what has happened, and at best they were too myopic to see the result. But that is in fact, in the big picture, the result that was produced.
Now back to the good professor. I described to him some of what I've observed with others, as stated above, then questioned for just how long these newly retired will last on the golf course or what have you. The idea being that decades of relentless pursuit of enriching "the man" changes a person. It reminds me of Solzhenitsyn's characterization of the gulag system as the sewage disposal system. They go into our sewage disposal system intact, eager and fresh and leave ragged, worn out and unrecognizable. They may have a temporary pile of loot or an income stream supposedly coming but remain blissfully unaware that that will probably be taken away in the Fourth Turning and they won't have the energy to regroup.
When I talk to someone like the good professor, who I consider to be significantly above The 97th Percentile, I sometimes probe around the edges a bit to see where their minds are at. Since he's a business professor, I tried to contain it to his field to the extent possible. These are the things I discussed in no particular order.
I said, well, you've had quite a run; in the early 80s, management consultants like Drucker and the business schools were just starting to recognize the benefits of introducing entrepreneurship as a methodology that could be applied to large organizations and you saw that right from the beginning and caught that entire wave. He nodded in agreement without any comment I can recall.
I also discussed things people can do in retirement with an emphasis on the fact that anything anyone can do in retirement as far as income goes outside of their area of expertise strictly falls into the category of being a hobby unless the world changes radically from what it is at present. I said, for example, someone can garden as a hobby, but that will never be anything more than that unless supply chains radically change from what they are. I said it's not like gardening in present conditions is going to result in an income of $20 per hour or higher. Maybe you get more nutritious food, but that's about it. He enthusiastically agreed with all of that but had no comments.
Next we got on the topic of AI. He knows a lot more about that than I do, obviously, and I listened to how he is using that to advise startups. My comments were that AI is not so good at the esoteric level but at the level of The 97th Percentile it is quite good and gave some examples. I don't believe I used those exact words, but something very close. I gave the example where I had probed AI to describe the impact the primary social technologies, specifically the Magna Carta, the Gunpowder Revolution, and the printing press had on the development of conditions favorable for the Industrial Revolution. Then I said that AI had been useful in listing secondary social technologies like double entry bookkeeping, which made financial statements transparent, including some that I had not thought of. I noted that the off balance sheet transactions that have become commonplace today have served to reduce transparency, the opposite conditions to what made the industrial revolution possible. He appeared interested in all that but had no comment.
[quote=tim post_id=95656 time=1792672177 user_id=2211]
[quote] The Hidden Looting by the Rich leads to the Physical Looting by Those Who've Been Looted
CHARLES HUGH SMITH
Those who aren’t delighted to further enrich the moneylenders in the temple with their labor quit in disgust, while those with zero scruples and limitless greed devote every waking hour to enriching the most avaricious few for their share of the loot.[/quote][/quote]
I sit at one point on the wheel which gives one perspective on this.
My cohort turns 65 this year. I've talked pretty extensively here about what I call The 97th Percentile. In a high school class of 300, The 97th Percentile could ideally be characterized as those who ranked from roughly Position 4 through Position 15. They are those who do the work without question and strive to do the best job they can. You could spend somewhere between 4 and 12 years around these people and get a pretty good feel for who fits in at that level. If a teacher is an entitled goldbrick who teaches two classes while wasting oodles of taxpayer money, The 97th Percentile will fear, aid and abet him without question.
I'll get back to that in a minute.
So Tuesday I went to my daughter's school to pick her up. School started about the first of September. Tuesday, for the first time this year, I saw one of the grandparents of a girl who is in my daughter's class. He's a Business professor here and I would put him right around my age. We were both happy to catch up. He told me he's been spending a lot of time working on AI. Been very busy helping businesses integrate AI into the operations. Lots of work. Then he turned the topic to retirement. Doesn't know what he would do if he retired.
Now I will switch back to those previously mentioned who were in Positions 4 through 15 and discuss an observation. Once they graduated college, nobody ever heard from them. The reason is, I think, that those at The 97th Percentile in a professional capacity in this day and age barely have the time to keep up with the work and other demands that are being placed on them. From my observation, these people sort of disappear into this black hole of "professional employment" for decades. As they near retirement, they will pop their heads up and proclaim that fact. Then, one at a time, again, in my observation, once retired, they will post photos of themselves on Facebook, LinkedIn, or what have you of the golf clubs on their back or whatever. They look like hell and are not even recognizable vis a vis their younger selves but apparently in their minds they have made it and can now proclaim it to the world, warts and all. And, as I posted not too long ago, something like 93% of then will have at least one chronic condition.
That bring us to the point of the quote above from Charles Hugh Smith, "devote every waking hour to enriching the most avaricious few for their share of the loot."
This might sound a little harsh to some. It does to me. I mean, I know some of them are good people. At best, they probably didn't intend for their actions to produce that result. But that is what has happened, and at best they were too myopic to see the result. But that is in fact, in the big picture, the result that was produced.
Now back to the good professor. I described to him some of what I've observed with others, as stated above, then questioned for just how long these newly retired will last on the golf course or what have you. The idea being that decades of relentless pursuit of enriching "the man" changes a person. It reminds me of Solzhenitsyn's characterization of the gulag system as the sewage disposal system. They go into our sewage disposal system intact, eager and fresh and leave ragged, worn out and unrecognizable. They may have a temporary pile of loot or an income stream supposedly coming but remain blissfully unaware that that will probably be taken away in the Fourth Turning and they won't have the energy to regroup.
When I talk to someone like the good professor, who I consider to be significantly above The 97th Percentile, I sometimes probe around the edges a bit to see where their minds are at. Since he's a business professor, I tried to contain it to his field to the extent possible. These are the things I discussed in no particular order.
I said, well, you've had quite a run; in the early 80s, management consultants like Drucker and the business schools were just starting to recognize the benefits of introducing entrepreneurship as a methodology that could be applied to large organizations and you saw that right from the beginning and caught that entire wave. He nodded in agreement without any comment I can recall.
I also discussed things people can do in retirement with an emphasis on the fact that anything anyone can do in retirement as far as income goes outside of their area of expertise strictly falls into the category of being a hobby unless the world changes radically from what it is at present. I said, for example, someone can garden as a hobby, but that will never be anything more than that unless supply chains radically change from what they are. I said it's not like gardening in present conditions is going to result in an income of $20 per hour or higher. Maybe you get more nutritious food, but that's about it. He enthusiastically agreed with all of that but had no comments.
Next we got on the topic of AI. He knows a lot more about that than I do, obviously, and I listened to how he is using that to advise startups. My comments were that AI is not so good at the esoteric level but at the level of The 97th Percentile it is quite good and gave some examples. I don't believe I used those exact words, but something very close. I gave the example where I had probed AI to describe the impact the primary social technologies, specifically the Magna Carta, the Gunpowder Revolution, and the printing press had on the development of conditions favorable for the Industrial Revolution. Then I said that AI had been useful in listing secondary social technologies like double entry bookkeeping, which made financial statements transparent, including some that I had not thought of. I noted that the off balance sheet transactions that have become commonplace today have served to reduce transparency, the opposite conditions to what made the industrial revolution possible. He appeared interested in all that but had no comment.