Men and the City 56 - Ethnos, Elites and End Times
The coming power vacuum and a new Western elite.
For men in the city crisis means transformation. Far removed from the citadels of power media headlines are beginning to broadcast a world in emergency. The clash between the Globalist West and the Global South in the Middle East and beyond has unleashed titanic forces resetting human affairs at every level. Amidst the global distemper the future of the West still rests upon its ethnos, the source-material of Western identity.
Paradigmatic shifts are unfolding across domains:
Economy: Globalization vs Sovereignty
Empire: Anglo-Zionist Empire vs Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa +Iran (BRICS+)
Energy: Petrodollar vs Petroyuan (maybe Petrocrypto)
Monetary: Euro-Dollar-System vs Multipolar-Monetary-World-Order (MMWO)
Politics: Elite vs Ethnos
Spiritual: Nihilism vs Faith
Warfare: 20th vs 21st Century Platforms
The macro paints a clearer picture than the micro. Civilizational borders are rigidifying, the BRICS+ and mortar of monetary power is measured in gold bullion not Treasury bonds, and globalization is fragmenting into spheres of influence dominated by regional powers. When we refocus the lens on Western politics the picture blurs and the direction of travel becomes harder to see. Nevertheless, the politics of scarcity threaten to collapse a fragile citadel, shattering a hollowed-out Western power structure rotten inside out and incapable of self-correction.
Viyathmaga Politics
Elite degeneracy is an existential threat to social stability. If you cannot protect, feed, and shelter the population government control dissolves quickly as Sri Lanka’s President Gotabaya Rajapaksa found out in 2022. In 2016, the Rajapaksa brothers (Mahinda was President from 2005 - 2015) formed a 32 member Executive Committee called Viyathmaga (“The Path of the Intellectual”). The “civil society movement” was rule by experts, academics and advocacy groups whose keystone was banning synthetic fertilizer in favor of biofertilizer. Viyathmaga’s technocratic vision was central to Gotabaya’s presidential election win in 2019.
Sustainability was the goal and revolution was the result. Viyathmaga’s agenda quickly morphed into an expedient cost-cutting-tool in 2020 when Covid lockdowns dried up tourism revenue. Viyathmaga allowed Rajapaksa to cut expensive agricultural subsidies while promising no disruption to Sri Lanka’s farm-based economy. In two years, farm yields cratered and food prices skyrocketed until the situation spiraled out-of-control and violent protesters stormed the Presidential Palace. Fearing for his life, Rajapaksa fled the country and submitted his resignation via email. What a turn-of-fate!
“Having handed its agricultural policy over to organic true believers, many of them involved in businesses that would stand to benefit from the fertilizer ban, the false economy of banning imported fertilizer hurt the Sri Lankan people dearly.”
Ted Nordhaus and Saloni Shah - In Sri Lanka, Organic Farming Went Catastrophically Wrong
Viyathmaga’s playbook was modeled on Western technocracy. Rule by “experts” is the norm across Western governments inside the European Union (EU). EU mandates against synthetic fertilizer, nitrogen emissions, and agro-subsidies are enforced at every level of governance by a degenerate class of elites. Inspired by the Green New Deal, groups like the Netherland’s Environmental Assessment Agency mandate “green farms” over the objections of farmers across the continent.
Green policies exacerbated piss poor planning post-Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine. Since 2022, when cheap energy from Russia was cut off permanently Europe’s first world standard of living has been in serious jeopardy. Affordable offshore LNG, diesel and jet fuel primarily from the Middle East has kept the eurozone afloat in the interim. Now that Iran has closed the Straits of Hormuz (SOH) Europe faces an energy crisis that will bring down governments.
Across the Atlantic the situation is also precarious despite more abundant resources. Just South of New England lies the Appalachian Basin, “the most prolific natural gas producing region on Earth,” according to Doomberg. Paradoxically, cheap and readily available energy from an adjacent region did not prevent New England’s electric grid from near collapse in winter 2017. Why? Because Viyathmaga politics halted pipeline construction into New England. Rule by degenerate elites strikes again.
The hallmarks of elite degeneracy are repeated, costly mistakes and no accountability. New England’s vulnerable grid like Europe’s energy crisis following the SMO compelled no course correction and certainly no accountability. In Germany, nuclear plants lay dormant while US states like California pursue bans on natural gas furnaces and appliances. Well publicized scandals are repressed by ever higher doses of delusion. Doomberg’s summary is sobering:
“You would think that the near collapse of their energy grid would have motivated the good people of New England to get serious about shoring up their energy needs ahead of future cold snaps. You would be wrong. Instead, they have set about the task of systematically dismantling existing critical infrastructure and blocking the development of proven technologies.”
New England is an Energy Crisis Waiting to Happen - Doomberg
Progress is not linear, it comes in spurts, and elite competency tends to time if not trigger these inflection points. Heed the wise words of Robert Gordon: “Economic growth is not a steady process…Instead, progress occurs much more rapidly in some times than others.” It is during the Age of Scarcity when a tested and capable building-class lays concrete, builds infrastructure and erects institutions that create long-term prosperity. During the subsequent Age of Prosperity the maintenance-class who inherits these structures slowly deteriorates until maintenance atrophies into neglect, and memory slips into amnesia.
Elite degeneracy is long past the sell-by-date. After festering for decades without consequence, crime, poverty, cultural decline and grift are completely out-of-control. Corruption from the highest levels of power is flagrant, like billion-dollar-bets minutes before presidential tweets. There is no shame because there is no accountability so who cares? The rank malfeasance feeds viral conspiracy theories that legacy elites are untouchable.
Suddenly and without warning an unforeseen shock breaks-the-system. Late-cycle elites continue to splurge as long-ignored fires flame into a new emergency no one takes seriously. One crisis blurs into another so demos and demagogue alike are numb to the latest headline. Degenerate elites cannot survive end-of-cycle transitions because they cannot recognize things have changed. The tactics that brought them to power (censorship, easy credit, propaganda and virtue-signaling) no longer work and adaptation is heretical.
“A man who is used to acting in one way never changes; he must come to ruin when the times, in changing, no longer are in harmony with his ways.”
Machiavelli Niccolo - The Prince
End Times: “The Nero Moment”
A new elite can ONLY emerge from the ashes of the old system when the demand for new leadership becomes urgent. At this early stage, the idea that developed Western economies governed by powerful institutions could implode is where most people cry bull shit. History says otherwise. What Peter Turchin coined “The Nero Moment” or “a sudden implosion of the state” has struck even the super powers of their day.
This time will be no different and it may be worse. Crane Brinton portrayed revolutions as a kind of infection. There are five “prodromal signs” or symptoms of revolutionary fever: economic discontent, class conflict, government ineptitude, elite defection, and state reluctance to use force. It is not a single match but a flurry of sparks that combusts into revolutionary fireworks, and the state cannot or will not extinguish the flames when it does. What matches do you see?
Here is a basic list:
Accelerated Change - Fears of a “human intelligence displacement spiral” are spreading from Silicon Valley to Main Street
“Crisis of Trust”- Trust in institutions: academia, media, government etc. have nose-dived post-Covid and are worsening by the year
Distress of the Commons - Across the West there is structural inequality between the commons and the citadel driven by higher cost of living, deep job insecurity, and profound social isolation
Government Debt and Dysfunction - Western governments have entered the debt doom loop and government dysfunction is only overshadowed by corruption inside the Epstein Class
Persistent Warfare - Western governments led by the US are involved in persistent warfare across the globe, from Russia’s SMO in Ukraine to Operation Epic Fury against Iran to blockading Cuba
Radicalization - Westerns populations are on edge, displaced by foreigners and demographically surrounded by tribalized migrants closing in around them
Pressure rises when there are no relief valves. As Brinton documents, societies under duress can amass amorphous social forces like white blood cells to fight infection. Revolutions often coalesce disparate forces into transformative movements that elites find hard to spot, never mind understand. When tried-and-true media spin cannot assuage the public, spontaneous opposition rises up and governments rattle. Just ask the Irish Taoiseach what he thinks?
Peacetime elites cannot weather end-of-cycle storms. Political calculation completely changes when social structures invert. Effective strategies last cycle become fatal in the next, especially during cycle transition. During dangerous times when trust is low, when reliable support fractures, and social contracts break all bets are off. Crisis creates a feedback loop of instability that is hard to escape and blame falls on those who hold power.
“In nearly two-thirds of cases, the crisis resulted in massive downward mobility from the ranks of the elites to the ranks of the commoners. In one-sixth of cases, elite groups were targeted for extermination. The probability of ruler assassination was 40%. Bad news for the elites.”
Peter Turchin - End Times
A recent meeting convened by the Fed crystalizes some of the trip wires ahead. In April, the Fed and Treasury assembled top CEOs to discuss the impact of a new AI model called Mythos. They also discussed growing concerns about private credit, what Wall Street calls “shadow banks.” Since 2008 lending has migrated away from heavily regulated big banks and towards asset management companies like BlackRock.
Government regulators fear systemic risks. Without safeguards, AI engines like Mythos could cyberattack banks and “trigger a broader loss of confidence in the financial system.” Equally unsettling, cascading losses in private credit are a contagion with gain-of-function potential to bring down entire markets with hidden counter-party-risk. Moody’s recently downgraded major shadow banks like KKR to near junk status because cheap credit is drying up. The outlook is not good:
“Private credit funds loaded up on software-company loans over the past several years because recurring subscription revenue seemed safe and predictable. Rising interest rates and AI-driven competition have since squeezed cash flows at many of those same borrowers who once seemed reliably profitable.”
Both private credit and the AI-complex are opaque, complex systems deeply embedded in the global economy. Massive money has been lent out at low interest rates across sectors post-2008: commercial real estate, car-loans, credit cards, mortgages, private equity, small businesses etc. The single-point-of-failure is refinancing. Massive bloat in data center CAPEX has simply added another layer to the Jenga tower (Did you see The Big Short?). As rates rise the correction will be violent and corporates, elites and governments will fall, but will the ethnos rise?
Rebuilding the Western Chariot
When (not if) the superstructure crumbles the million-dollar-question is what will the ethnos do? Unsurprisingly, far too many doomers and conspiracy junkies assume the West’s future is Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, an inescapable Samsara of Spenglerian decline. Others languish under the Gnostic nightmare that globalist archons will soon unveil the final plan for humanity’s eternal damnation. These fatalistic fantasies deprive the West of one of its most potent archetypes - the Chariot.
What birthed the West is not moralizing but mobilizing. Here we can perhaps deploy Spengler’s deterministic cycle against itself. As Constantin von Hoffmeister recently penned, Spengler “insists that the true engines of world history lies in deeds, weapons and styles of combat, rather than ideas or moral narratives.” The spirit of “history advances through those who impose form by force and rule by mastery.” This is a lesson we will soon relearn.
What is lacking for the Western ethnos is not a revitalizing philosophy but an existential challenge worthy of mass mobilization. The Western ethnos does not need to refute Jewish intellectualism through discourse and debate; rather, the ethnos needs shock therapy. Unfortunately, though it is hard for red pillers to believe, Western people’s remain unmoved because they have not felt enough pain, yet.
The ethnos has been disarmed by disinterest. Masses of migrants never conquered us, nor have they demonstrated the capacity to do so, even as the numbers of non-whites has swelled to gargantuan proportions. The truth is Westerners dismiss third worlders who we pity as helpless drones, incapable of creating (or destroying) anything worthy of our attention. Obviously, such complacency is a mistake.
Acute breakdown will burn the boiling frog. Then, the benumbed and bored Western ethnos will forge its chariot, “a means by which small, highly trained elites imposed themselves upon numerically larger, agriculturally rooted populations.” Literally, the chariot meant mastery of animals, weaponry and speed; metaphorically, the chariot means a counter-elite or vanguard defined by the “capacity to transform speed, discipline, and violence into order.”
“This explains, for example, how the British Empire maintained rule in India with only tens of thousands of British administrators and troops over a population of hundreds of millions.”
Constantin von Hoffmeister - The Chariot and Western Supremacy
Rebuilding the chariot means a modernized, reorganized, vanguard. Certainly the pretext for mobilization will be the fall of the citadel. However, like all weapons of war, our chariot requires technical design, seed funding, programmatic implementation, and a unifying vision. These component parts will emerge in time but just as the world we live in has changed so too have the requirements for an organic mass movement. Network effects are scalable but without a chariot there will be no revolutionary change, no restoration.
Towards the Empty Summit
As we transition from one cycle to another the false God of democracy is the last paradigm holding us back. The discerning ethnos already know democracy has fallen because as I penned nearly two years ago, it has utterly failed “to represent the will of its citizens, to protect the nation from rising violence, migrant invasion, electoral chaos and spiraling poverty.” The predicament we face is transcending or overcoming democracy with a new sovereign (Latin super or “above”).
Ultimately, restoration depends upon reclaiming the “empty summit.” The revolutionary heretics of our day like Nick Land, Alexander Dugin, and Jason Jorjani agree on one point: in its present form “democracy is not merely doomed, it is doom itself.” What these philosophers urge in broad synchronicity is an “exit,” a “third way” beyond liberalism. The crisis ahead will clear a path to that higher summit.
The empty summit is a post-liberal-point of acceleration. Nick Land believes the summit will be filled by the singularity but I believe it will be reoccupied by the sovereign. Remember, America like all nations emanates from an ethnos and a mythos, a biological reality and a metaphysical myth fused into one. Since the republic (Latin res publica or “public affairs”) has been expropriated from the founding ethnos all that remains is a fading, impotent myth stripped bare like America’s industrial base.
Democracy in America rests upon a dead sovereign not upon a dead people. It is derived from the authority of the mythical Founding Fathers and their canon: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. While these documents remain sacralized in the nation’s capitol and America’s Hall of Records the constitutional order they sketched out died long ago. We need a new myth, a new sovereign, something Up, Beyond Left or Right.
For context, America must look beyond its borders. America is a young nation, barely 400 years old, 250 if you start in 1776. By contrast, our European forebears are half-a-millennium-plus older, scarred and scabbed by countless wars of unification, conquest, and defeat. Europe’s civilizational muscle memory is therefore much stronger but so are its national traumas. Indeed, America’s “horizontal expansion” manifest in mastery of economy, industry and technology defined its adolescent centuries.
America’s adulthood will usher in “vertical ascent” towards a higher Mount Rushmore. This brings us back to the overt failure of America First and Make America Great Again. Both movements imploded primarily because they offered an implicit definition of who and what America is, they are ethnos-lite Therefore, both accepted the terms of an order explicitly committed to their destruction. Ironically, the framers of the constitution made the same mistake when they left America’s racial identity vague or subject to interpretation.
We are on the cusp of a transformation that will revive Western identity. The coming crucible will wipe out degenerate elites at the helm of a rudderless state. A fraught power vacuum will befall western countries including America. Emergency will birth a mass mobilization moment and new movements across the West will redefine Western Civilization explicitly, they will be ethnos-heavy. Remigration will not be policy, it will be the preamble.
How that process unfolds will vary by country but the precondition for America’s succession is enshrinement of the ethnos. This is the mission statement for the new cadre of Reforming Fathers, something akin to the modernizing Samurai of the Meiji Restoration. The freshly inked final draft of America’s next constitution will stand on the memory of reconquista, the legitimizing myth of a new order that lays claim to the empty summit. It will be end times for the elites and rebirth for the ethnos.
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