Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

[Higgenbotham]

As the world accelerates into the new dark age, the financial crisis should be the first card that comes up. It will be hard to know how things shake out until we are well into that. Right now we can guess which local municipalities and their debts will fare worst but even that is unlikely to tell us much, as I tend to think it will be a total wipeout. You can look at infrastructure because the infrastructure you've got in an area may well be the one you're going to have. Also, the problem with making an assessment during the coming financial crisis, in my opinion anyway, is that it will have no clear end like the 1932 stock market low or something like that. What comes to mind is Jim Kunstler's phrase, "The Long Emergency". When civilization was on the ascent there were 4th turning cleanses. The worst continued to quickly worsen (Galbraith) relatively speaking, then people straightened their acts out and got religion. There will be no such thing this time in my opinion, just a lot of false dawns, then lower lows. In the stock market that will translate into buying the dip all the way down for the next 20 years only for stocks to get crushed again as the dip buyers stare in disbelief as the market loses 70 percent, 89 percent, 92 percent, 95 percent, 98 percent and even more.

[Higgenbotham]

Descent

The descent will be characterised by economic
false dawns. The United States budget and trade
deficits, for example, may occasionally improve,
but they will soon worsen again. These deficits are
intimately connected with other features of the
current order, such as drugs trafficking, welfare
dependency, and the costly protection of American
interests world wide. No one, however determined,
can rationally sort out these problems, whose
interactions are far from fully understood. The
deficits must remain a chronic problem.
The booms that take place during the descent
will be based on much less substance than were
former periods of great growth in the world
economy. The mobile phone, the internet and
computer games will not create eddies upon eddies
of economic organisation in the way that the steam
engine did, or the aeroplane. Economic growth
may occur on paper but there will be fewer real
differences to people’s material standard of living.
It will not deliver tangible utilities like cars,
televisions and foreign holidays. Instead, one of the
big growth industries today is gambling, and it is
questionable how far that can be said to make
people feel better and live better. Similarly, the
internet is certainly a boon, but its overall
contribution to human welfare is mediocre. Giving
people ready access to vast amounts of
pornography hardly compares with the drama of
the industrial revolution.
In future, therefore, to gauge how the descent
is going, one should not be taken in by statistics.
The crucial measure of economic health will be the
evidence of genuine innovation that people
experience in their everyday lives. If some major
new item appears in one’s home, comparable to the
vacuum cleaner, the video recorder, or the
microwave oven, one can assume that the dark age
is getting further away, perhaps by a quarter of a
century or more. On the other hand, one may find it
difficult to identify what is driving the stock
market. One’s own consumption may be of mostly
transient pleasures, and one may worry whether
one’s work is really making a positive contribution
to the commonweal. In that case, the economic
descent will be proceeding unchecked.

THE PHOENIX PRINCIPLE AND THE COMING DARK AGE
Social catastrophes – human progress
3000 BC to AD 3000
Marc Widdowson
Amarna Ltd
Bedford
Copyright © 2001 by Amarna Ltd
First published 2001 by Amarna Ltd, 35a Chaucer Road, Bedford, MK40 2AL, United Kingdom

Page 294

[Higgenbotham]

If this is the start of the financial crisis, and I have no idea whether it is or not, there's nothing to get excited about with the S&P at 7400 and down 300 points today. Anything over about 1000 on the S&P is all fantasy froth. That will all evaporate with time. The evaporation will be uneven as dip buyers reflexively come in. Those who have been dip buyers have been rewarded since 1987 and they have all the cash. So they will do what they do until they become exhausted and it will take a long while. The algos will do what they do also which is to mimic the irrational emotional actions of traders, just in a more convoluted way. Once the dip buyers become exhausted and the algos go out of business, then the S&P will spend a few more years in the despair phase as it circles the drain to its low that will stand for a few years or maybe even longer.

[Higgenbotham]

My mother grew up in a small town in one of the red counties of the upper midwest. edit: Actually, her county is orange. When I was a boy, she told me it takes 2 generations for a newcomer to town to be fully accepted by the people in the town. For anyone making a move to one of these areas, you would be advised to, first of all, understand the culture and, second, to expect that your family will be giving more than you take for a very long time. It's been my experience that some people will spread rumors, and some of those will not be very flattering. It is what it is.

My personal situation is my family lived in that town from the 1860s until my mother left. My father lived in the adjacent town. Both grandparents owned farms. My mother's mother left her 80 acre farm to me (and my sister but I was primarily responsible for it). After my grandfather died at age 98, all the land around that 80 was owned by then by one farmer who had accumulated about 4,000 acres. I sold the 80 to him on the low side of the fair price range. All of that farmland depends on diesel. Once it can no longer run on diesel at that scale (if that happens), then I will be heading back there.

[Higgenbotham]

If the sixty years seemed full of brilliance and adventure to a few at the top, to most they were a succession of wayward dangers; of the three galloping evils, pillage, plague, and taxes; of fierce and tragic conflicts, bizarre fates, capricious money, sorcery, betrayals, insurrections, murder, madness, and the downfall of princes; of dwindling labor for the fields, of cleared land reverting to waste; and always the recurring black shadow of pestilence carrying its message of guilt and sin and the hostility of God.

Mankind was not improved by the message. Consciousness of wickedness made behavior worse. Violence threw off restraints. It was a time of default. Rules crumbled, institutions failed in their functions. Knighthood did not protect; the Church, more worldly than spiritual, did not guide the way to God; the towns, once agents of progress and the commonweal, were absorbed in mutual hostilities and divided by class war; the population, depleted by the Black Death, did not recover. 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. People felt subject to events beyond their control, swept like flotsam at sea, hither and yon in a universe without reason or purpose. 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.

The times were not static. Loss of confidence in the guarantors of order opened the way to demands for change, and miseria gave force to the impulse. 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. Marcel could not impose good government, neither could the Good Parliament. The Jacques could not overthrow the nobles, the popolo minuto of Florence could not advance their status, the English peasants were betrayed by their King; every working-class insurrection was crushed.

Yet change, as always, was taking place. Wyclif and the protestant movement were the natural consequence of default by the church. Monarchy, centralized government, the national state gained in strength, whether for good or bad. Seaborne enterprise, liberated by the compass, was reaching toward the voyages of discovery that were to burst the confines of Europe and find the New World. Literature from Dante to Chaucer was expressing itself in national languages, ready for the great leap forward in print. In the year Enguerrand de Coucy died, Johan Gutenberg was born, although that in itself marked no turn of the tide. The ills and disorders of the 14th Centruy could not be without consequence. Times were to grow worse over the next fifty-odd years, until at some imperceptible moment, by some mysterious chemistry, energies were refreshed, ideas broke out of the mold of the Middle Ages into new realms, and humanity found itself redirected.

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
1978

I'm seeing comments even from the collapsosphere of late that certain of these things can't happen in this day and age. From my perspective mostly they can. Cleared land reverting to waste? What happens when 5,000 acre farms run out of diesel or the machinery breaks down?