Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

[Higgenbotham]

Demarest off the cuff.

https://www.arthurdemarest.com/collapse ... s-today-2/

"You know what's going to bring our civilization down?...the byproducts of our incredible technology, our wonderfully successful capitalist economic system, our tremendous linking through communications and information systems, and the spread of democracy. That's what's gonna bring us down. The combination of all those things has caused a real boom which will lead to a giant, giant bust."

"So, you know, we're collapsing. But I'm not just a grumpy old man, we're collapsing. Although it sounds like it. I'm an expert on the collapse of 18 civilizations and we're collapsing. We've got everything. We've got every single fucking cause of collapse you could want except radical climate change and that's beginning. So, but as I've told you, don't worry about global warming. We won't make it far enough for that to be a problem. I think the wars are going to be the end of everything but only because the infrastructure's so vulnerable because of hypercoherence and technology it's also fragile."

The recording is no longer available.

[Higgenbotham]

While Strauss and Howe say total war doesn't necessarily have to happen, this is what they say must happen.

When ancestral generations passed through these great gates of history, they saw in the Gray Champion a type of elder very different from the bustling senior citizens of America's recent past and from the old “Uncle Sams,” the Revolutionary War survivors of the 1830s, when Hawthorne wrote his tale. Who were these old priest-warriors? They were elder expressions of the Prophet archetype. And their arrival into old age heralded a new constellation of generations.

Where were the other archetypes at the same moments in history? Who was entering midlife in 1689? The cunning likes of ex-pirate Benjamin Church, or the reckless Jacob Leisler, leaders among a Cavalier Generation that bore more adversity (and cruelty) than any other cohort group of New World settlers. In 1775? The Liberty Generation peers of George Washington, skilled at the harsher tasks of history. 1865? Chivalrous Gilded colonels, ruined farmers, cynical industrialists, and one lone assassin. And 1944? The ex-Doughboy Lost Generation whose gutsy generals and unpretentious politicians made the tough choices while younger war heroes won the applause. These were Nomad archetypes.

Who was coming of adult age? The team-playing, upbeat Glorious Generation of Cotton Mather; Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton of the Republican Generation, the greatest civic achievers in U.S. history; and the G.I.s who scaled the cliffs of Point du Hoc and harnessed the secret of the atom. These were Hero archetypes.

Who were the children? The Enlightenment Generation children who later became the first students at Yale and at William and Mary College and still later the polite professionals who waited patiently to inherit the new colonial institutions founded by their elders; the Compromise Generation's John Quincy Adams, weeping as he watched from a distance as friends of his father fought and died at Bunker Hill; the Progressive Generation's Theodore Roosevelt, hoisted on a parent's shoulders as he watched Lincoln's funeral train roll by; and Michael Dukakis, age eight on Pearl Harbor Sunday and age ten on D-Day, hearing his parents talk about forging a new political and global order that he would later try to improve. These were Artist archetypes.

At each of these great gates of history, eighty to a hundred years apart, a similar generational drama unfolded. Four archetypes, aligned in the same order—elder Prophet, midlife Nomad, young adult Hero, child Artist—together produced the most enduring legends in our history. Each time the Gray Champion appeared marked the arrival of a moment of “darkness, and adversity, and peril,” the climax of the Fourth Turning of the saeculum.

In nature, the season that is about to come is always the season farthest removed from memory. So too in American history, past and present. Less than 10 percent of today's Americans were of soldier (or riveter) age on D-Day, the climax of the last Fourth Turning. Less than 2 percent have adult memories of 1929's Black Tuesday, when America last entered a saecular winter. Among their juniors, few can conjure how an Unraveling-era mood can so swiftly transform into something that feels and is so fundamentally different. Americans have always been blind to the next turning until after it fully arrives.

We may prefer to see ourselves as masters of nature, controllers of all change and progress, exempt from the seasons of history. Yet the more we balk at seasonality and the more we try to eradicate it, the more menacing we render our view of time—and of the future. Most of today's adult Americans grew up in a society whose citizens dreamed of perpetually improving outcomes: better jobs, fatter wallets, stronger government, finer culture, nicer families, smarter kids, all the usual fruits of progress. Today, deep into a Third Turning, these goals often feel like they are slipping away. Many of us wish we could rewind time, but we know we can't—and we fear for our children and grandchildren.

In a sense, Americans resemble a primitive people who, feeling the dry chill of a deepening autumn, grow nostalgic for spring while wondering how (or even if) the moist warmth will ever arrive again. Many Americans wish that, somehow, they could bring back a saecular spring now. But seasons don't work that way. As in nature, a saecular autumn can be warm or cool, long or short, but the leaves will surely fall. The saecular winter can hurry or wait, but history warns that it will surely be upon us.

We may not wish the Gray Champion to come again—but come he must, and come he will.

Thus will the Gray Champion ride once more.

Eight or nine decades after his last appearance, America will be visited by the “figure of an ancient man ... combining the leader and the saint (to) show the spirit of their sires.” Again will appear the heir to the righteous Puritan who stood his ground against Governor Andros, the old colonial governors of the American Revolution who broke from England, the aging radicals of the Civil War who pitted brother against brother with a “fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel,” and “the New Deal Isaiahs” who achieved their rendezvous with destiny.

Whence will come the Gray Champion? Picture the Boomer Overclass of the Unraveling, aged another twenty years. Picture William Bennett's “Consequence and Confrontation” missives; Al Gore predicting an environmental cataclysm; James Webb's summoning a “ruthless and overpowering” retaliation against foreign enemies; James Fallows rooting for a “7.0 magnitude diplo-economic shock”; “Apocalypse Darman” and “Default Newt” with their budget train wrecks; Earth First saboteurs, willing to sacrifice other people's lives to save trees; and Army of God antiabortionists summoning the terminally ill to “use your final months to torch clinics.” Picture Boomers like these, older and harsher, uncalmed by anyone more senior, feeling their last full measure of strength, sensing their pending mortality, mounting their final crusade—all at a time of maximum public peril.

The full dimension of the Boomer persona will only emerge when today's better-known 1940s birth cohorts (whose youth was marked by relatively few social pathologies) are joined in public life by the tougher-willed, more evangelical 1950s cohorts (whose youth was marked by many more pathologies). That is the mix that will beget this generation's elder priest-warrior persona, vindicating the early Unraveling-era warning of Peter Collier and David Horowitz that Boomers are “a destructive generation whose work is not over yet.”

As the Crisis deepens, Boomers will confront the end result of their lifelong absorption with values. They will have laid a long trail of Unraveling-era rhetoric, much of it symbol and gesture, but now the words will matter. When James Redfield (or his elder equivalent) describes his peers as “a generation whose intuitions would help lead humanity toward a ... great transformation,” the summons will no longer be for pensive spiritual reflection but for decisive civic action. Boomers will comply with Cornel West's suggestion that “the mark of the prophet is to speak the truth in love with courage—come what may.” Their habitual tendency to enunciate unyielding principles will now carry the duty of enforcement.

The final Boomer leaders—authoritarian, severe, unyielding—will command broad support from younger people who will see in them a wisdom beyond the reckoning of youth. In domestic matters, old Boomers will recast the old arguments of the Culture Wars into a new context of community needs. They will redefine and reauthenticate a civic expansion—crafted from some mix of Unraveling-era cultural conservatism and public-sector liberalism. In foreign matters, they will narrowly define the acceptable behavior of other nations and broadly define the appropriate use of American arms.

The same Boomers who in youth chanted “Hell no, we won't go!” will emerge as America's most martial elder generation in living memory. Whatever the elements of Crisis, old Boomer leaders will up the moral ante beyond the point of possible retreat or compromise. The same Boomers who once chanted “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win!” will demand not just an enemy's defeat, but its utter destruction. They will risk enormous pain and consequence to command youth to fight and die in ways they themselves never would have tolerated in their own youth. They will believe, as did Cicero, that this moment in history assigns “young men for action, old men for counsel.”

Old Boomers will find transcendence in the Crisis climax. As they battle time and nature to win their release from history, they will feel themselves in position to steward the nation, and perhaps the world, across several painful thresholds. It is easy to envision old Aquarians as pillars of fire leading to the Promised Land—but just as easy to see them as Charonlike monsters abducting doomed souls across the Styx to Hades. Either is possible.

As the Crisis resolves, elder Boomers will have not the last word, but the deep word. If they triumph, they will collectively deserve the eulogy Winston Churchill offered to Franklin Roosevelt: to die “an enviable death.” If they fail, their misdeeds will cast a dark shadow over the entire twenty-first century, perhaps beyond. Whatever the outcome, posterity will remember the Boomers' Gray Champion persona long after the hippie and yuppie images have been forgotten to all but the historian.

And if the Crisis ends in triumph, what will come of the splendid new Victory Generation born just after it ends? As children, they will be
indulged. As youths, they will revolt against the Millennial-built world. In midlife, they will protect their children from civic decay. As elders, sometime around the year 2100, the Gray Champion will appear yet again among them.

As the next Gray Champion, the Boom Generation will lead at a time of maximum danger—and opportunity. From here on, Boomers will face the unfamiliar challenge of self-restraint. Having grown up feeling that G.I.s could always step in and fix everything if trouble arose, Boomers have thus far pursued their crusades with a careless intensity. In the Fourth Turning, G.I.s will no longer be around as a backstop, and the young Millennials will follow the Gray Champion off a cliff. If Boomers make a wrong choice, history will be unforgiving.

The continued maturation of Boomers is vital for the Crisis to end in triumph. These one-time worshipers of youth must relinquish it entirely before they can demand from Millennials the civic virtue they themselves did not display during the Awakening. This will require a rectitude that will strike some as hypocritical, yet it will be no more than a natural progression of the Prophet's life-cycle persona. When the Crisis hits, Boomers will need to defuse the Culture Wars at once. Their pro-choice secularists and pro-life evangelicals will need to move beyond their Unraveling-era skirmishes and unite around an agenda of national survival, much as Missionary elders did during depression and war.

Boomers must also display a forbearance others have never associated with them. By nature, they will always tend toward self-indulgence in their personal lives—but if they allow this to overflow into public life and demand generous public benefits, they will bankrupt their children financially, themselves morally. Unlike the Silent, sneaking through unnoticed will not be an option. Worse, if Boomers become pointlessly argumentative and let their values back them into a corner, their current talk-show hyperbole about annihilating enemies could translate into orders to use real doomsday machines.

Come the Crisis, Boomers will face the utterly unyuppielike task of presiding over an era of public authority and personal sacrifice. This generation must squarely face the threat its unyielding moralism could pose to its own children, to the nation, indeed to the entire world. “When people repeat the slogan ‘Make love not war,’ “historian David McClelland has warned, “they should realize that love for others often sets the process in motion that ends in war.” But if aging Boomers can control the dark side of their collective persona, they can look back on their role in the Fourth Turning the way old Ben Franklin looked back on his. When asked what image belonged on the national seal of the United States, the old man replied: the inspiring image of Moses, hands extended to heaven, parting the waters for his people.

Modern societies too often reject circles for straight lines between starts and finishes. Believers in linear progress, we feel the need to keep moving forward. The more we endeavor to defeat nature, the more profoundly we land at the mercy of its deeper rhythms. Unlike the Navajo, we cannot withstand the temptation to try closing the circle ourselves and in the manner of our own liking. Yet we cannot avoid history's last quadrant. We cannot avoid the Fourth Turning, nor its ekpyrosis. Whether we welcome him or not, the Gray Champion will command our duty and sacrifice at a moment of Crisis. Whether we prepare wisely or not, we will complete the Millennial Saeculum. The epoch that began with V-J Day will reach a natural climax—and come to an end.

[Higgenbotham]

I've been looking for something potentially significant to happen from the 5566 level in the S&P and it wasn't happening - until today. Maybe the long-awaited crash will start from that high and reversal today.



Also, the S&P futures are down 26 after hours. If there's a big gap and go lower in the morning (or maybe Monday if 5400 holds all day tomorrow), that would leave a monster island top on the S&P above 5400.

[aedens]

Hypercoherence, one of the most dangerous threats to the long-term survival of civilization. Tue Dec 06, 2016 11:18 pm
Files will be and removed 404 since that was pattern recon to what you also forwarded in hypercoherence.

As indicated wait for the ichi cloud for sweeps. We are 46 percent cash and was unwinding all week.
The noted date as june17 was noted as heads up and updated with the ichi pattern suspect which is confirmed from our
view only.
We are adding into the middle bond curve rather and watching gap fill miss in equity follow-up sweeps.
These discussions have been valid and noted as island top reversals. Wed Jul 17, 2024 11:21 am

John 12:40 covers the map also as we are.

You are here. https://search.brave.com/search?q=aladd ... 7b5436b307

They are stuck. Dont guess.

[John]

Global selloff today, across Europe and Asia, led by Intel.

[Higgenbotham]

If there's a big gap and go lower in the morning (or maybe Monday if 5400 holds all day tomorrow), that would leave a monster island top on the S&P above 5400.

We did get it.



There doesn't seem to be a great deal of concern yet. People probably think Powell can just lower interest rates and get the bubble going again. One of these times, the bottom will fall out faster than the Fed can contain it.

[John]

The other thing is that bond yields have been cratering,
so investors have been moving money out of stocks
into bonds.

[aeden]

As we considered retail spoon feeding unhedged.

[Higgenbotham]

Probably the Fed will make some noises or even some moves Sunday night or early next week to try to slow the angle of descent of the stock market.

It's been noted here and oft repeated by Gundlach that the Fed follows the 2 year. That would indicate a rate cut, but they probably won't do an emergency rate cut unless the market (S&P 500) goes below 5,000 the first half of this month. Just my best guess based on past behavior.

[aeden]

https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h8/20240726/

https://x.com/ArkhamIntel/status/181905 ... 30/photo/2

plugging holes