Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

[Higgenbotham]

It was my opinion that the US government was broken beyond repair in 2011 when they failed to control Bernanke. What that meant to me was Donald Trump would not be able to fix it. Ross Perot could have because his bid was prior to 2011. Of course, this is the opinion of one person only and the opinion of one person is not consequential. But that was why I believed that, although it would be good to have Trump in there because that took control away from the people who ran it into the ground, Trump would not be able to fix anything, just speed up or slow down the established downtrend in different areas from where the political establishment was heading. He did a good job of that in my opinion.

Given that there is no functional national government, someone can look to the lower levels and make their decisions based on that. If a functional state government is desired, based on my observation and experience, Texas has one. If a functional state government is not desired, someone can either look to having a functional local government or no functional government at all. I would like to live where there is a functional state government, for now, and have been in Texas for 17 years. Once things go completely to hell in a handbag, I think it would be better to be in a place that has as little government as possible at the state and local level.

[Higgenbotham]

I've been thinking about what happens at the micro level prior to the collapse into a dark age.

When I attended the University of Michigan, there was a guy in my class who was the kind of guy who would be reading the newspaper as we were sitting outside the room waiting for an exam to start while the rest of us might be just staring into space trying to keep from clouding our thoughts. He was the kind of guy who would crack open the book for the first time the night before the first hour exam and say that the way the professor wrote the book was stupid (while everyone else was trying to figure out what the hell the professor was saying) before going in and getting the highest score on the exam the next day. That wasn't to say he didn't work or was lazy. He was double majoring in both electrical and chemical engineering and so far as I know was at or near the top of both classes and finished in 4 years. Senior year, the department head asked him to sign up for a special program to eventually become a professor at the university. He said no, he didn't want it. I should have asked him why he didn't want it, but for some reason I didn't. I can only imagine the reasons and wonder if he was seeing something I couldn't see, as was the case with many other things. He has a minor job at a big corporation. Looking at the roster of who the university has now or the corporations for that matter, all I can say is that I am certain that on a micro scale the US educational system and probably the country as a whole would be better off if he had said yes.

[Cool Breeze]

It was my opinion that the US government was broken beyond repair in 2011 when they failed to control Bernanke. What that meant to me was Donald Trump would not be able to fix it. Ross Perot could have because his bid was prior to 2011. Of course, this is the opinion of one person only and the opinion of one person is not consequential. But that was why I believed that, although it would be good to have Trump in there because that took control away from the people who ran it into the ground, Trump would not be able to fix anything, just speed up or slow down the established downtrend in different areas from where the political establishment was heading. He did a good job of that in my opinion.

Given that there is no functional national government, someone can look to the lower levels and make their decisions based on that. If a functional state government is desired, based on my observation and experience, Texas has one. If a functional state government is not desired, someone can either look to having a functional local government or no functional government at all. I would like to live where there is a functional state government, for now, and have been in Texas for 17 years. Once things go completely to hell in a handbag, I think it would be better to be in a place that has as little government as possible at the state and local level.

I agree with you.

Why do you think some of the heavy hitters on this site don't understand this, though?

[Cool Breeze]

I've been thinking about what happens at the micro level prior to the collapse into a dark age.

When I attended the University of Michigan, there was a guy in my class who was the kind of guy who would be reading the newspaper as we were sitting outside the room waiting for an exam to start while the rest of us might be just staring into space trying to keep from clouding our thoughts. He was the kind of guy who would crack open the book for the first time the night before the first hour exam and say that the way the professor wrote the book was stupid (while everyone else was trying to figure out what the hell the professor was saying) before going in and getting the highest score on the exam the next day. That wasn't to say he didn't work or was lazy. He was double majoring in both electrical and chemical engineering and so far as I know was at or near the top of both classes and finished in 4 years. Senior year, the department head asked him to sign up for a special program to eventually become a professor at the university. He said no, he didn't want it. I should have asked him why he didn't want it, but for some reason I didn't. I can only imagine the reasons and wonder if he was seeing something I couldn't see, as was the case with many other things. He has a minor job at a big corporation. Looking at the roster of who the university has now or the corporations for that matter, all I can say is that I am certain that on a micro scale the US educational system and probably the country as a whole would be better off if he had said yes.

He likely did it for many reasons, but mostly because the juice wouldn't have been worth the squeeze. Like modern relationships for well to do men in the West. The system encourages the weak and degenerate "is best" narrative, and rewards them. Demonizes the competent. Til things collapse.

[Higgenbotham]

I've been thinking about what happens at the micro level prior to the collapse into a dark age.

When I attended the University of Michigan, there was a guy in my class who was the kind of guy who would be reading the newspaper as we were sitting outside the room waiting for an exam to start while the rest of us might be just staring into space trying to keep from clouding our thoughts. He was the kind of guy who would crack open the book for the first time the night before the first hour exam and say that the way the professor wrote the book was stupid (while everyone else was trying to figure out what the hell the professor was saying) before going in and getting the highest score on the exam the next day. That wasn't to say he didn't work or was lazy. He was double majoring in both electrical and chemical engineering and so far as I know was at or near the top of both classes and finished in 4 years. Senior year, the department head asked him to sign up for a special program to eventually become a professor at the university. He said no, he didn't want it. I should have asked him why he didn't want it, but for some reason I didn't. I can only imagine the reasons and wonder if he was seeing something I couldn't see, as was the case with many other things. He has a minor job at a big corporation. Looking at the roster of who the university has now or the corporations for that matter, all I can say is that I am certain that on a micro scale the US educational system and probably the country as a whole would be better off if he had said yes.

He likely did it for many reasons, but mostly because the juice wouldn't have been worth the squeeze. Like modern relationships for well to do men in the West. The system encourages the weak and degenerate "is best" narrative, and rewards them. Demonizes the competent. Til things collapse.

This brings to mind previous discussions of "dofenism", especially this one:

As Ayn Rand understood, when the top 0.1% adopt "I would never have lifted a finger' as their preferred course of action ("Going Galt", or in the former Soviet Union "Dofenism"), or are ignored, the top 2% absent the top 0.1% can run things into the ground very, very quickly. Of course, those numbers are approximate; I don't know what they really are.

All links to discussions about "dofenism" are here:

search.php?keywords=dofenism

Your mention of modern relationships also brings up minor reasons that factored into my thinking about when certain states went into a dark age. I quickly determined while I was at the University of Michigan that things with the women were "off" compared to where I grew up (out of state), as they had been pretty thoroughly infected by feminism and negative, disdainful attitudes toward men all the way back to 1979 and prior. This was displayed to me most poignantly when I walked into the bathroom in my dorm to find my roommate repeatedly punching the door on the bathroom stall as it swung wildly, to the point that he got a boxer's fracture out of it. I asked somebody what was wrong and was told it had to do with a woman. I didn't want to know any more. I did not notice this as badly affecting Wisconsin until the mid 1990s and was surprised to find that it hasn't affected Texas to this extent even now. Which reminds me, the guy I mentioned at Michigan may not have been as bright as me when it came to women, as he married one of our classmates and is divorced. I thought back then that he made a mistake marrying her.

[Higgenbotham]

It was my opinion that the US government was broken beyond repair in 2011 when they failed to control Bernanke. What that meant to me was Donald Trump would not be able to fix it. Ross Perot could have because his bid was prior to 2011. Of course, this is the opinion of one person only and the opinion of one person is not consequential. But that was why I believed that, although it would be good to have Trump in there because that took control away from the people who ran it into the ground, Trump would not be able to fix anything, just speed up or slow down the established downtrend in different areas from where the political establishment was heading. He did a good job of that in my opinion.

Given that there is no functional national government, someone can look to the lower levels and make their decisions based on that. If a functional state government is desired, based on my observation and experience, Texas has one. If a functional state government is not desired, someone can either look to having a functional local government or no functional government at all. I would like to live where there is a functional state government, for now, and have been in Texas for 17 years. Once things go completely to hell in a handbag, I think it would be better to be in a place that has as little government as possible at the state and local level.

I agree with you.

Why do you think some of the heavy hitters on this site don't understand this, though?

Let's talk about the Federal Reserve first. Tying this back to the previous post, I was talking to a woman who worked for the Wisconsin Pension Board or whatever it is called. This was around 2004 and I told her that the Federal Reserve should be abolished. She dropped me like a hot potato immediately after I said that. I can only guess that in her mind I was some right wing conspiracy nut who temporarily escaped from my bunker in Northern Idaho and was advocating the overthrow of the Federal government. I think the problem was and still is to a slightly lesser extent that the Federal Reserve is something that most people only vaguely understand, much less connect to anything meaningful beyond the fact that they print our currency and control the supply of money and short term interest rates. A few years ago, I linked to a survey given to members of the Triple Nine Society, which is a high IQ group that goes way beyond Mensa, only admitting people with IQs that occur at a frequency of 1 in 1000 or less. In the post, I pointed out that while Democrats consider themselves the more intelligent of the 2 parties, Triple Nine Society members lean Libertarian by a huge margin in many areas except in how they view the Federal Reserve. The point being that Triple Nine Society members are not fooled by anything except what the Federal Reserve is and what it should be doing, in my opinion, and if even those people can be fooled and I am right in what I am saying, not much can be done.

https://mises.org/library/pretense-knowledge

Hayek told them, but they refuse to listen.

If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible. He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants. There is danger in the exuberant feeling of ever-growing power which the advance of the physical sciences has engendered and which tempts man to try, "dizzy with success," to use a characteristic phrase of early communism, to subject not only our natural but also our human environment to the control of a human will. The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men's fatal striving to control society — a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.

Jerome Powell: (49:02)
After the financial crisis, we started a new whole division of the Fed to focus on financial stability. We look at it from every perspective. The FOMC gets briefed on a quarterly basis. At the board here, we talk about it more or less on an ongoing basis. So, it is something we monitor, but I don’t know that the connection between asset purchases and financial stability is a particularly tight one, but again we won’t be just assuming that; we’ll be checking carefully as we go. And by the way, the kinds of tools that we would use to address those sorts of things are not really monetary policy; it would be more tools that strengthen the financial system.

The first paragraph is 99.7th percentile thinking.

The second paragraph is 97th percentile thinking.

It seems to be a constant in human affairs that The 97th Percentile will refuse to listen to those who know better than them because The 97th Percentile thinks they are the smartest guys in the room.

I was surprised to find a link with extensive data which supports this view.

It's from an organization called the Triple Nine Society, which only admits people with IQs proven to be above the 99.9th percentile, and they did an extensive survey of political views among members. It turned out that their members support neither a Democrat nor Republican agenda, but rather lean strongly Libertarian toward very limited government. For example, 94% are in favor of gun ownership at the same time 60% are in favor of minimal restrictions on prostitution.

http://milesresearch.com/tns/summary.htm

So while it may be true that The 97th Percentile tends to support socialism and consider themselves qualified to tell the rest of society what is good for them, those rare individuals with IQs more than one standard deviation above The 97th Percentile do not support those views.

It should be noted, though, that about 150,000 adults in the US would be qualified to join this organization, but it only has about 350 members, so there could be some bias in the results due to the type of person among the high IQ population who would tend to join such an organization.

The majority of survey participants support the status quo for the Federal Reserve, but the survey was done in the early 2000s (October 2000) before the Fed went off the rails or, alternatively, didn't have an extensive history of having gone off the rails. Greenspan was a bit off the rails at the time.

65 __ Federal Reserve Board: Rate on a scale of 1-5
(1= Abolish the Fed, 3= Status quo, 5= Maximum control of interest rates, the money supply and other economic parameters)

Federal Reserve Board
1= 12%
2= 19%
3= 63%
4= 5%
5= 0%

[Guest]

At the micro level, the average person will die.

[Guest]

What about ethnostaes being formed after the collapses in North America and Europe?

[tim]

I'm interested in this thread and your perspective. Looking forward to reading more.

[Higgenbotham]

Intelligence has never been the issue, wisdom has been.

This industrial civilization goes to great lengths to assess and identify individuals who have intelligence according to the criteria that generally lead to career success and put those people in positions of decision-making (within limits of intelligence), but has no processes in place to assess and identify individuals who have wisdom or to place them in any position of decision-making. Also, in our everyday conversations both public and private, there are constant references to those who are “smart” but somewhere between zero and a very small number of references to people who are “wise”. Therefore, it’s not possible to point to a group of wise people who have been identified by some tried and true process and know what that group thinks about the Federal Reserve, or anything else. The problem if the wise were to somehow get control of decision making at this time is that the position industrial civilization currently finds itself in is not a good one for the wise to grapple with. People with wisdom are good at keeping a civilization on the correct path but not so good at knowing what to do with it once it has deviated from that path for a long time. An example of that might be the question of whether the world should have gone down the path of R&D and manufacturing of synthetic chemicals. The wise probably would have determined not go down that path, but in this industrial civilization they weren’t in any position of authority to determine whether that was going to be done; the intelligent (at the approximate level of the 97th Percentile, but not the highest level) were. Now that we have gone down that path, the wise probably can’t help us. Similarly, now that the Federal Reserve boondoggle has been going on for a long time, assuming abolishing the Fed is a wise choice, the wise can’t help much with that either. However, there are “primitive” civilizations that do have processes to assess and identify individuals who have wisdom and put them into positions of responsibility and authority. Those are the villages and their elders. If the large and highly centralized governments in this industrial civilization were to collapse, followed by important decision-making being made at the town level, I believe there would be improvement in the quality of decisions being made. Probably not uniformly, but at a minimum in isolated pockets, and those pockets of good decision-making will be the areas that will prosper and become models for other places to follow as they try to regain their footing.

Having said that, intelligence clearly is an issue. It's pretty clear to me that intelligence correlates with wisdom, probably not strongly or linearly (r = perhaps 0.4 or 0.5 on average). It correlates with individual success and societal success using a wide range of definitions as to what success means. Having The 97th Percentile make decisions rather than the 99.7th percentile is a huge problem. Somehow boosting the level of The 97th Percentile (in other words, those who are the decision-makers) to the current level of the 99.7th percentile would result in huge positive benefits.