Let's go back to Gen. Glubb. He never once said what we should do, how we may be able to avoid the -- according to him -- inevitable catastrophe. He simply provided us with a few key indicators that the collapse is near. Picking up, in a sense, where he left off, Ross Ashcroft bundled a lot of Glubb's (and others') thinking into a video (hey, who reads anymore?) that deals with the same topic. The video is entitled "The Four Horsemen", making direct reference to the Apocalypse of St. John, or as it is better known, The Book of Revelation in the Bible, one of the "standard guides" to the end of the world ... or at least to the end of the world as we know it. (It is freely available on YouTube (what isn't these days) -- at least for my most loyal readers -- in both English and German.)
Ross interprets Glubb's decadence characteristics in a slightly different way. Most specifically, he more or less ignores, Glubb's "influx of foreigners" and replaces them "a weakening of religion" with an "obsession with sex" and a "debased currency". We have already seen that Glubb wasn't all that far off, and these two new factors, well, it would appear that these factors aren't all that far off either. Let's say, they are later additions, not corrections.
Think Internet, think pornography: it's the most widely distributed form of content available. There's something there for everyone's (so-called) "tastes": adult, child, professional, amature, hard, soft, male-female, male-male, female-female, and every imaginable combination ... you want it, you can find it. What was once tabu is now mainstream, if "Fifty Shades of Gray" is any indication of the state-of-the-art (and I use the term loosely). That's a given.
And, we all know, our money's not worth anything anymore anyhow. Wars have been fought (Gulf War II), nations have been destroyed (e.g., Iraq, Libya) because they "choose" the "wrong" reserve currency. The gold standard was abandoned a long time ago, but the "gold standard" of currency remains the US dollar, and we all know the Americans will do anything -- and I mean anything to ensure that doesn't change, regardless of how little the dollar is worth.
The point is that -- and I don't think I'm overstating the case -- things are going from bad to worse. Glubb makes a sound, and noteworthy point. Ashcroft underlines and enhances it in a very meaningful way. Things are not getting better, they are getting worse. It looks like we're going down for the count, or, in swimming terms: go down a third time and you drown.
Again, the point is not so much how terrible things are, but rather that we (humanity, Western Civilization, whatever) is faced with yet another total collapse. It is clear to me, and it should be clear to anyone who has even taken a passive, fleeting look at how the world or economies or cultures work, to know that the choices we have made in all of these areas are simply not sustainable. Whether we could have avoided this crisis, or whether it would have been possible to do things to avoid all the suffering that is to come are moot points. It just doesn't matter. Things are as they are, and things are going to come as they are going to come.
We shouldn't deceive ourselves into thinking that things aren't as bad as we think or that the crash won't be as hard as we fear. It will be both, but, in the end, it doesn't matter. Whatever comes, comes. Many, many people, cultures, and civilizations have suffered and lived through similar crises in the past. The only reason that we will have to suffer is because those who came before us, our forebears, refused to learn from history. So, we've got a choice. We know what's coming. We know what's going to happen. And, most importantly, we know why. We have a huge opportunity before us. The question is whether we are going to take advantage of this opportunity or whether we are going to waste it, like all those who have preceded us have done. The choice is ours. Which one will we make?
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