Men in the city face a crisis of competency. What holds society together at its most basic level is faith. Faith can be rooted in common religious beliefs and practices, a shared belief in common kinship and racial-cultural destiny, or a unifying civic ethos. In any case, faith is the glue that holds people together, it is the basis for what we call community. What happens when faith breaks down, when the underlying belief structures that virtually everyone blindly accepts wobble or disintegrate?
History tells us that a collapse of faith often sends civilization into a tailspin. Edward Gibbon, like Machiavelli before him, argued that the Roman empire broke down when its founding ethos, the values of austerity, courage, and glory gave way to hedonism, passivity, and nihilism. In a desperate attempt to consolidate a fracturing empire, Emperor Constantine turned to Christianity as a restorative force he hoped would stabilize Roman society; it failed to do so. As Gibbon’s diagnosed, “every principle which had once maintained the vigor and purity of Rome…were long since extinguished in a declining and despotic empire.” Rome limped on for several decades after Constantine’s reforms, but its vitality was never salvaged, some would say it was completely diluted henceforth. Does the American-led West face a similar collapse of faith?
The faith that continues to animate America no longer emanates from racial-cultural, ethno-mythical or religious belief. Rather it appears to rest on ever-higher standards of living afforded comfortably by the State, and faith that however corrupt, decadent, or misguided the technocratic elites who govern may be, they remain all powerful. Ultimately, they fully control our lives in every way, from surveillance to propaganda and money, and there is virtually nothing we can do about it, so the logic goes. The saving grace, according to this view, is a rock-solid belief in the competency of the Gerontocracy. However, this conviction, which ironically is strongly shared by the red pilled, black pilled and blue pilled alike, is likely to crack, and soon. What happens then?
Make No Little Plans
The first article of faith among the masses is that the omnipotent Gerontocracy have expertly planned for every scenario. If they want war, they manufacture false flags, if they want surveillance they co-opt big tech companies, if they want spin they orchestrate mainstream-media newspeak. So engrained is the idea of elite mastery that it stokes widespread paranoia of ever greater “plandemics,” “Choke Point 2.0s,” WEF Resets, CBDCs backdoored through FedNow, each precision planned and impossible to stop, never mind disrupt. Without question, there are well documented conspiracies of the highest order from the 2008 bank bailouts to Obama’s Fast and Furious scandal and Snowden’s disclosure of Project Prism, and countless more. Still, what we face today is a crisis of technocratic incompetency, in some ways a far scarier prospect, in other ways an opportunity.
What we face today is a crisis of technocratic incompetency.
Economies are human systems and human systems are inherently unstable. The contemporary definition for economics is the “allocation of scarce resources,” an incomplete definition. A better one is the allocation of scarce human resources. The success of small businesses, Fortune 500 corporations, construction projects, technological breakthroughs, military units, government agencies, and the productivity multiplier effect these create depends upon the efficient allocation of human capital. Author Garett Jones called it the Hive Mind, he said a high average IQ underpins a nation's productivity and induces a social multiplier effect that underpins everything from civic institutions to economic growth. Maintaining societies with high IQs is indispensable, as is allocating the high IQ population where it is best needed; we have done neither.
Since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and the mass immigration waves that began in the 1980s America’s human system has degraded by degrees of magnitude. Harold Robertson alarmingly demonstrated the cascading effect of this breakdown in his excellent essay “Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis.” According to Robertson, “As a consequence of escalating rates of failure, America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing: "The core issue is that changing political mores have established the systematic promotion of the unqualified and sidelining of the competent.” The result is the replacement of competent people with increasingly less competent ones at a steadily increasing rate.
Maintaining societies with high IQs is indispensable, as is allocating the high IQ population where it is best needed; we have done neither.
Every level of American society (and the West in general) has been degraded by this human capital turnover. Governments have been completely restaffed by woke incompetents, Fortune 500 companies bear no resemblance to the dynamic industrial titans they once were, the US military has become an expensive diversity project (as I have said before) and so-called elite corridors in law and medicine have been methodically watered down. Even at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) where tiny mistakes instantly kill hundreds (or more) when planes collide, errors are mounting. The result, as Robertson warned, is that:
“catastrophic normal accidents will happen with increasing regularity. While each failure is officially seen as a separate issue to be fixed with small patches, the reality is that the whole system is seeing failures at an accelerating rate, which will lead in turn to the failure of other systems.”
The response to these claims is the following – “it’s all part of the plan.” The managed breakdown of America: its imperial over-stretch, financialization, mass immigration, the explosion of the Welfare State, feminization, wokism etc. were all designed to take apart the country piece-by-piece. Globalists expertly implemented these insidious plans over the decades and at this point their mission appears accomplished. Certainly, derailing systems like destroying your body is not that difficult; however, controlling the collateral damage and steering catastrophic events is virtually impossible, even if they are completely premeditated. The unwinding of America’s financial system is a perfect example.
Testing Social Cohesion
In 2010 Moody’s conducted a survey of the long-term fiscal situation confronting Western countries. The conclusion offered by chief author Pierre Cailleteau was deafening: "Growth alone will not resolve an increasingly complicated debt equation. Preserving debt affordability at levels consistent with AAA ratings will invariably require fiscal adjustments of a magnitude that, in some cases, will test social cohesion." I was working on Capitol Hill at the time and I asked a senior staffer what “test social cohesion” meant. He assumed a wry smile and said, “riots in the street.” That was in 2010, when the National Debt was a measly $13T+, today it is $34T and climbing. Clearly, 14 years on fiscal spend has not abated so Moody’s concerns were unfounded, and we have nothing to worry about. Right?
Wrong. Central bankers are beginning to sound alarms regarding the upper limits to government spending, what the Fed calls “Fiscal Dominance.” In short, fiscal dominance means “the need for government to fund its deficits on the margin with non-interest-bearing debts.” Basically, the USG is so broke, its expenses are so massive, it cannot afford to pay interest on its debts, never mind the pay off the debt itself. So, the monetary authorities (central bankers) must buy the debt (AKA “print the money”), problem solved. Well, not according to a 2023 paper written by the St. Louis Fed.
There are limits to money printing (as there are on everything man-made) based on very specific variables. Charles Calomiris, author of the report tells the truth: “At some point, as the government debt-to-GDP ratio rises sufficiently…the real demand for government debt reaches a maximum.” When is that “point” reached? Well, we have some idea of that too, “The answer is sensitive to your belief about…the path of real interest rates and economic growth.” In other words, when interest rates rise (they are), and economic growth stalls (it is) the Fed (and other central banks) are forced to implement fiscal dominance.
Here is where things get dicey. At this point, the Fed will require “banks to hold a large fraction of their deposit liabilities as zero-interest [Treasuries] reserves.” Translation, the Fed will mandate by law (which is legal by the way) that commercial banks (and maybe investment corporations) buy government debt (Treasuries) and the US government will pay them zero interest for holding them while they (Treasuries) collapse in value. If the Feds do this, says Calomiris, there will be “a major shock to the profits of the banking system” because depositors will turn to “financial disintermediation,” a fancy term for a mass exodus from US banks into something else. What else? My guesses are: Bitcoin, Gold, commodities, anything that can preserve capital value, and prevent confiscation by authorities.
Unintended Consequences
We are not entirely in uncharted waters. During the Great Depression, FDR declared bank holidays to lock people out of their accounts, outlawed private ownership of gold, and recapitalized the banking system with Gold to stabilize a financial system buried in debt. So, the playbook is slightly different but nonetheless can be reapplied. Problem solved, right? There are still more complications.
As a recent paper put forth by the Group of 30 pointed out: “A major issue common to all banking systems is that runs will be much faster compared to earlier periods, given the greater ease of withdrawals with more online real-time banking. Contagion will be larger, given the faster spread of information through social media.” As they point out, Credit Suisse experienced a massive run following a bad earnings report, perhaps the final nail in the coffin after years of risky behavior (remember Archegos Capital?). In other words, sensitivity to small changes in bank solvency is a tightrope because people are more aware of what is happening, not less.
There are additional complications. The same report calls attention to “operational frictions” that constrain the bailout process. First, there is a shortage of “pre-positioned collateral” and familiarity with the process of accessing the “discount window.” Part of the reason Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) went down is because of a “lack of operational preparedness” because SVB could not “mobilize the eligible collateral rapidly enough.” In other words, managerial error played a big role in SVB's demise, errors only compounded during emergency; the human factor strikes again. In times of crisis, competency becomes essential, and banking is no exception.
The United States is in the early stages of default.
The United States is in the early stages of default. Government institutions, US military readiness, quality healthcare, legal services, and yes, banking operations are succumbing to a broad-based decline in human capital. At the same time, the margin for error, especially in terms of fiscal insolvency, bank runs, recessionary forces, and geo-political flash points is virtually non-existent. As the debt bomb continues to detonate, the malignancy of America’s crisis of competence will only be exposed further by stress on its interconnected systems. Such egregious incompetency, however fatal, will also hasten the Age of Scarcity and provide opportunity for competent men in the city to rise, again.
Fireworks lie ahead and smoke alarms are beginning to sound off. A fire team will be needed to put it out. The Neo-Masculine Movement is that fire team. Get ready!
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