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On The Great Jihad And Other Possible Futures
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This is a really helpful overlay to Four Horseman. It helps square, for me, some earlier pieces on ET that seemed slightly at odds because I wasn’t thinking about it like this—specifically re Zombification vs Great Reset. Thanks!
I completely agree; this article is a great starting point in establishing the current state of things and possible future outcomes…
Clear and concise…just what us slower members of the pack need to synthesize Ben and Rusty’s treatises.
Thank you. This is insightful. It begs the question, however, of who will do the choosing between ways? Obviously not one person, but I’m curious for your thoughts on the most likely players who will exercise some agency in this, recognizing that there will be many (foreign and domestic – hell, I suppose Lady Luck and even Earth herself may exert an influence). But I’d love to open a discussion of the relative weightings of the most likely agents.
I read Dune when I was but a young pup. Most of it clearly went over my head. Thanks for the reminder!
The decision/probability tree you laid out resonates well with me. I love this way of thinking. As the chaos of recent days unfolds it is a welcome tonic reminding us of how little we really know about the future.
Thank you for the kind words. I think the key players to watch are:
-Policymaking Elites (especially monetary authorities)
-Political Entrepreneurs (both “mainstream” and alternative)
-The Oligarchy
-Alternatives Grassroots Movements (like the ET Pack!)
I thought about adding Fiat News Outlets to this list, but my feeling is that they are more instrument than actor.
Also worth noting: the visualization used in this post is nice and “clean,” but it’s also oversimplified and reductive. In reality, these threads are all intertwined to an extent, and they aren’t connected by straight lines but rather exert a kind of gravity on each other. The strength of the gravitational fields that different ideas and players exert has a lot to do with how common knowledge develops and propagates, and the Narrative Machine helps us visualize this process as it happens.
This is really clear and concise, thanks.
If the nature of the modern system is issuing money and financial assets and propping them up with state power, then reset (with small r) by inflation was always going to be at least part of the long-term landscape.
Small-j jihad helps cheapen the cost of reset, so if great wars are no longer desirable now that major countries have nukes, proxy wars and conflicts might have to do the job partially. (The way jihad cheapens resets is by getting the populace to accept a higher degree of control by the authorities, so part of the financial adjustment can be achieved by repression.)
I see the most likely future as a combination of (mostly) reset plus jihad. There can be no socially good way to fix the financial imbalance, because all the incentives are for top politicians, bureaucrats, central bankers and financiers to destabilize the very system that benefits them.
Strictly speaking, there is yet another way of Great Reset, and that is finding a new issuer of money and assets, a reasonably big and strong country that still has a low cost structure, that is also friendly enough to help the existing issuer country decline gently.
The next such country (after Britain helped the Netherlands, and America helped Britain, to retire gracefully) is going to be India. But that’s probably a few decades away, so the Great Inflation might be unavoidable at this point.
Nevertheless, historically, timely Great Resets by imperial succession was what kept the price of silver/gold in currency terms constant from the early 1600s all the way to the 1870s/1930s in the top economies. That was truly amazing, if you think about it.
Thanks for these thoughtful comments, Bob. A definite enhancement to the original note. Your comment about the interplay between jihad and resets in particular is a nice extension to the note. To be honest, that wasn’t something I’d considered when writing the note.