These are the key points I've taken from Armstrong's blog entry.Higgenbotham wrote: ↑Thu May 20, 2021 12:32 pmThe Coming Dark Age
Blog/Understanding Cycles
Posted Sep 20, 2016 by Martin Armstrong
The cause is always political corruption.
Coinage is debased because of the corruption in government. The system as we know it is always doomed to failure simply because we are satisfied as a whole with bread and circuses and let politicians run wild in their greed.
We can understand what is coming and WHY, and perhaps take that first step out of darkness and move into the light of a realistic political system that ends the bribing of citizens and this eternal battle of political corruption.
These are some of the general thoughts I've had on the topic posted here over the years.
Higgenbotham wrote: ↑Sat Dec 03, 2011 2:00 pmI'm going to make a novice attempt to define the difference between the beginning of a Dark Age and a typical fourth turning crisis era.
First attempt: A Dark Age is defined as the social and political breakdown of a regional or world hegemonic power which creates a power vacuum for which there is no clear and immediate successor.
Now I'll use Tuchman's words to further attempt to define a Dark Age.
"Mankind was not improved by the message. Consciousness of wickedness made behavior worse."
This is a clear distinction in my view and we are seeing Dark Age behaviors today, behaviors that have not been seen to this extent in seven centuries. As the financial crimes go unprosecuted, the consciousness of that knowledge has apparently increased the willingness to commit even bigger financial crimes.
"Rules crumbled, institutions failed in their functions. Knighthood did not protect; the Church, more worldly than spiritual, did not guide the way to God."
Another clear distinction. Today's dominant institution, the nation-state, which displaced the decrepit 14th century institutions, is failing in its functions, is not protecting, and is morally bankrupt.
"The towns, once agents of progress and the commonweal, were absorbed in mutual hostilities and divided by class war."
This hasn't happened yet, but the flash mobs, Anonymous and Occupy Wall Street movements are probably the beginning of the mutual hostilities and class war.
"The population, depleted by the Black Death, did not recover."
This hasn't happened yet, but if 14th Century timelines continue to hold, permanent population depletion will happen (in the US) within 5 years and maybe 10 at the outside. It's already happened in the former Soviet Union.
"The war of England and France and the brigandage it spawned revealed the emptiness of chivalry's military pretensions and the falsity of its moral ones. The schism shook the foundations of the central institution, spreading a deep and pervasive uneasiness."
Already discussed somewhat above, and there does seem to be a deep and pervasive uneasiness.
"The oppressed were no longer enduring but rebelling, although, like the bourgeois who tried to compel reform, they were inadequate, unready, and unequipped for the task."
Already discussed somewhat above, and the Occupy Wall Street crowd, for example, clearly does seem inadequate, unready, and unequipped for the task of governance. If we are entering a Dark Age, it will be found that nobody can govern and part of the reason, I believe, is simply that the US as it exists is ungovernable. As mentioned before, I don't think any dictator in his right mind will want to take over the US and try to restore order because it can't be done. Also, see my definition above.
"They lived through a period which suffered and struggled without visible advance. They longed for remedy, for a revival of faith, for stability and order that never came."
I believe this in a nutshell is the future for the next several decades at least.
Higgenbotham wrote: ↑Sun Feb 05, 2012 12:04 amHiggenbotham wrote:I would expect the beginning phases of a descent into a Dark Age to be milder than if an actual cleansing and regenerative process were to occur instead. In a descent into a Dark Age, one way to look at it is we continue to borrow more from the future instead of stopping at some point and replenishing the future. That is what clearly continues to happen, as we can see. There are many symptoms of that, but an obvious one is the failure to have enough children to replenish the population and we see that across all of the Western societies with Japan taking the lead. As Peter Drucker has commented, this is unprecedented.
The fifth horseman of the apocalypse
By Spengler
The essay below appears as a preface to my book How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying, Too).
Population decline is the elephant in the world's living room. As a matter of arithmetic, we know that the social life of most developed countries will break down within two generations. Two out of three Italians and three of four Japanese will be elderly dependents by 2050. [1] If present fertility rates hold, the number of Germans will fall by 98% over the next two centuries. No pension and health care system can support such an inverted population pyramid. Nor is the problem limited to the industrial nations. Fertility is falling at even faster rates - indeed, at rates never before registered anywhere - in the Muslim world. The world's population will fall by as much as a fifth between the middle and the end of the 21st century, by far the worst decline in human history.http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Eco ... 3Dj05.htmlPopulation decline, the decisive issue of the 21st century, will cause violent upheavals in the world order. Countries facing fertility dearth, such as Iran, are responding with aggression. Nations confronting their own mortality may choose to go down in a blaze of glory. Conflicts may be prolonged beyond the point at which there is any rational hope of achieving strategic aims - until all who wish to fight to the death have taken the opportunity to do so
Higgenbotham wrote: ↑Sun Feb 05, 2012 1:37 am"Spengler's" article linked above elaborates on the meaning of the above 2 paragraphs posted a few months back.Higgenbotham wrote:A permanent reduction in population over some time scale longer than, say, a saeculum seems to be characteristic of a Dark Age as opposed to a normal crisis period. Naturally, this is a case of arbitrarily defining something as opposed to something else and giving it a name.
So how could a scale of population reduction that is 10 times that of the prior saeculum occur? My thesis is that a Dark Age scale population reduction can only come about through large scale individual moral and institutional failure. This is harder to quantify, but my previous post describes what that looks like as opposed to typical crisis period failure.
Within the past 45 years, rationalizations for furthering the death of culture and civilization have been encoded into the belief system of the Western nation-state. As "Spengler" points out, it is beyond fixing. It's no longer understood exactly what it is that perpetuates a culture and a civilization and what does not. Technological progress does not and "Spengler" adequately points out the disadvantages of emphasizing technological progress on the birthrate and the linkage of that to a descent into a Dark Age (he doesn't use that exact term but alludes to it) but, at the same time, civilizations that encroach on indigenous or technologically inferior cultures cannibalize the cultures that they come into contact with. There doesn't seem to be any way out of that trap.
The tipping point will be reached when there is nothing left to borrow from the future and nothing left on the periphery to cannibalize.
Higgenbotham wrote: ↑Sat Mar 24, 2018 7:22 pmBack in late 2011 I posted:aeden wrote:I think your dark ages theme points out some stark realities on ethics...
I think it has to be, at its root, an ethics problem. There are a lot of commonalities to, let's say, the pervasive belief that it is acceptable for an institution not to be Triple A, not to have pristine credit. It's become acceptable, even considered preferable, not to be or exhibit pristine anything on both an individual and institutional level.My thesis is that a Dark Age scale population reduction can only come about through large scale individual moral and institutional failure.
