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Men in the city are stuck in limbo. Over the last month I have been in four countries and the prevailing sentiment is one of unease; there is an ominous sense that the world is on tilt, ever wobbling inescapably towards a cliff. Facing the dark clouds of a gathering storm the awakened masses are pondering what to do about it. Among the ranks of the unplugged there are two predominant mindsets: those who say, “fuck it” and get on with their lives. These folks tend to be the most informed, the most disillusioned, and perhaps due to information overload have swallowed the blackest of Black Pills. Second are the Red Pilled men in the city who share the same premonition of peril but these men – perhaps by temperament, will or excitement – cannot sit back and do nothing. So, what is to be done?
Sometimes reality is too much. Seneca was right when he said, “The more the mind takes in, the more it expands.” Human beings can only process so much at a time in most things: diet, entertainment, exercise, and especially awareness. It is well known that adopting a new habit or dropping an old one takes at least thirty and frequently ninety days on average (read more here). Sustaining that new habit or refraining from the old one until it becomes second nature takes much longer, and even prior addicts years into recovery can relapse in a split second. The human psyche is delicate, impressionable, and overly dependent on fixed belief structures upon which most anchor their entire lives. When these psychological pillars break down the masses are shaken up in unpredictable ways.
The speed and impact of recent events weigh heavily on the collective psyche. Normies are just beginning to process the transformative effects of Covid, inflation, disclosure, the War in Ukraine, higher interest rates and the downstream political instability and global reorganization these events have triggered (see my video here). Indeed, the frequency of these tremors is stepping up a gear: more banks are failing (Heartland Tristar), USG debt continues to soar, and bills are piling up for cash poor households. Student loans, car loans (many are paying a thousand dollars per month), mortgage payments and credit card statements are gushing like geysers all around us. Even the US Government was downgraded by Fitch for the first time in a decade. Isn't this just the "new normal"? What gives?
The FTE Approaches
At what point do these concussive episodes provoke mass human reaction? Entrepreneurial muse MJ DeMarco believes that the entrepreneurial journey begins with an FTE – a “Fuck this Event.” An FTE is the moment when the drudgery of your "scripted" life crashes down on you like a hurricane, when the daily grind becomes so unbearable, so indigestible that the mind can no longer cope, and forbearance becomes intolerable. It is at that existential moment that mind, body and soul converge to take action and a new life path or hero’s journey commences. Forecasting the when of such a collective transmutation is beyond us and “dwells with Gods above.”
And yet the Gods of finance (and perhaps the Gods of War) are whispering beware. Bond markets around the world are teetering: German Bunds, UK Gilts, and US Treasuries are in a race to zero. Yields are rising (see above), which means bonds – the “pristine collateral” that lubricates the global financial machine – are depreciating rapidly. It is not merely that SIFI banks and sovereign institutions hold these assets that scares me; bonds are the staple of pension funds, the most socially sensitive financial instrument under management today. A pension fund crisis nearly brought down the UK government last September (read more here) and clashes between protesters and government police over pension reform threatens to bring down President Macron, the French government, and potentially the entire European Union itself.
An accident in the bond market could unleash the FTE. As a fresh issuance of a Trillion dollars worth of IOUs for this quarter's fiscal spend alone courtesy of the US Treasury Department is set to flood the market like a tsunami one wonders who will buy these bonds? As the BRICS and the GCC and the SCO plus a growing list of African and Latin American countries – the irrelevant “shithole” Third World countries so designated by the Gerontocracy in the West – inch ever closer to de-dollarization the prospect of a financial Vesuvius comes into view. Most alarming of all is the negligent attitude towards these game-changing developments in DC, London, NYC and Brussels. Rest easy because they are unconcerned and so should you be. Au contraire.
The specter of a failed auction as happened in 2021 looms large. If you recall, a botched Treasury auction (not enough bids on bonds) peddling 7-Year UST bonds spiked yields (interest payments) overnight and spooked the entire market. The blip passed largely unnoticed – like a faint tremor in the San Andreas Fault – so few paid much attention. However, given such a sizeable issuance of debt, credit cracks spreading, troubling signs of recession (see video above) and hovering in the background steady escalation in Ukraine the US government is blithely walking into a minefield of its own design.
Where is the Horse and the Rider?
The Wanderer is an Anglo-Saxon poem that inspired JRR Tolkien’s epic Lord of the Rings. The medieval poem provided Tolkien with a treasure trove of thematic arcs, psychological insight, and gave him the name for “Middle Earth.” At its core, the Wanderer tells the tale of a man who has lost everything after his kith and kin and kingdom are destroyed, leaving him to wander the earth in search of salvation and sanity. Several passages like Aragon's song below were sourced from The Wanderer's poignant stanzas. As the “breaking of the world” approaches do we face the same fate?
“Where now are the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing? Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing? Where is the harp on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing? Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing? They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow; The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow. Who shall gather the smoke of the deadwood burning, Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?”
Fortunately, the answer is No. The coming dissolution will wash away a perverse and cancerous legacy structure long overdue for immolation. Men in the city, as I have said before, are the reconstruction team. It is the Neo-Masculine mission to capitalize on the self-destruction of the Gerontocracy and the fall of Beta-Tyrants to restore a world to sanity. No storm troopers are coming for us. We are the storm troopers; the horse and the rider is us.
As the Age of Prosperity grinds to a halt in a spectacular slow-motion train wreck the Age of Scarcity will be a time of liberation. Breakthroughs in technology, new scientific paradigms, and a new, more God-fearing spiritual awakening will bring reform, rebalance and restitution for the Good Men who stand at the ready. In between now and then as Luke Gromen puts it, “I have high conviction on the destination, I have low conviction on the path to get there.” The transition will be tumultuous indeed, a dazzling light show of flares and fireworks, but it will be a time of kings, a time for Good Men. So what is to be done? Embrace the change that is coming, prepare for the bumpy road ahead, and have faith that it's all been done before, and will be done again.
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