As we try to assess The Shift, we find a monumental task before us:  Is the future knowable?  And, if it is something discernible now, what degree of confidence should we place in our decision-making given that the future has a way of getting “drifty” on us?

Broadly stated, there are three make tracks into tomorrow – and thereafter:   The Best Case, the Middle Case, and the Worst Case.

The Best Case is easy:  We find a source of cheap – unlimited – energy and manage to get it into the public domain via the Internet so fast that corporations aren’t able to control it, thus keeping free energy genuinely free, or near to it.

The middle case is what George often writes about although most people think of it as worst case.  That’s the scenario where big corporations continue to consolidate their mastery over humans, having already asserted dominance of politics through unbridled spending.  From there, it was just a short hop to public bankrolling of corporate losses as evidenced by the kinds of companies which enjoy FDIC protection beyond basic human account holders.  Toss in corporate-controlled government waging wars of wide segments of humans and you’ve got evidence that Mussolini was right when he called his vision of fascism “corporatism” prior to World War II.

“That is the middle case”, you’re wondering?  “Surely there’s nothing worse out there, except getting smacked by a comet or something, right?”

Well, hate to break this to you darling, but there is.

We received a contributed paper from an unimpeachable source this past week which has already been posted on the Peoplenomics web site.  We’re posting it here because it speaks volumes about how really very much worse the future could be – far worse than what’s bespoke presently even in our darkest moment.

The paper’s author is a professional in a future-directed specialty where the future of countries is determined by getting the bigger picture view right.  His moniker, Captain Midnight, understates his true background, if not rank, which makes his message all that much grimmer. He’s in a position to know far more than most.  Way more;  trust us on this.

‘The Cogitations of Captain Midnight’ and The Larger Shape of Things To Come

As Captain Midnight writes, autumnal rains patter down outside in the darkness.

The days have grown shorter; the nights longer as the autumnal equinox is past, and we settle in for winter.  It promises to be a pretty fall – the first traces of color have arrived, and the reds and gold’s show every indication of especial glory this year.

The squirrels will be frantic later today, scurrying about, burying nuts in ground softened by the rains.  The bucks are getting randy, and paying little attention to anything, except the does and the rival suitors of the fall rutting season.  There’s a pretty fair pile of dry wood in the woodshed (although it needs splitting yet), but there will yet be time to get some more in before the hawk settles in on the north wind and the snows come.  Hopefully.  That’s just where we are.  In more ways than one.

Captain Midnight reflects that those ways include the world financial markets, too.  We collectively have a bit more time.  But not much, as the glorious days of Indian Summer are always too short, it seems.  Then comes – winter.  And it promises to be a long and hard one.

Whether you follow the Elliot Wave school, and believe we are at the end of a Grand Super Cycle wave, or you go in for the longer term X, Y, and Z wave assessments of Miller, Joubert and Butler that build upon the basic Elliot Wave theory, we seem to have come to the end of an age – the terminus of an era, the true fin de siecle for our modern times.  Here we are.  What next?

If we indeed have arrived at our winter, we face, depending on whether you go with strict Elliot Wave theory or the extend XYZ rubric of the aforementioned authors, somewhere between 60 and several hundred years of extended financial downturn.

Captain Midnight personally thinks that from a Western European/North American perspective, we are likely in for the longer.  A good case can be made that Asia, for which the current Euro-centric Elliot Wave count is a less suitable fit (and no, Captain Midnight isn’t going to give you a link for that thesis – do you own due diligence on that one), may only be facing the shorter of the downturns.  Nonetheless, down we go.

So . . .

What’s a real, long, hard economic winter going to look like?  What can we do to prepare?  Let’s look at the first question in a few moments, and address the last question first.  First, do you NEED to prepare?

Captain Midnight argues maybe not.  If you have no children, and you are older, why bother?  Nothing you can do will prevent the world from slipping into a darker time.  You’ve been present at the party!  You’ve had a great time!  Maybe you could help a bit washing up the glasses and emptying the ashtrays and taking out the garbage, but hey, the party’s about over.  You should head home, get a decent night’s sleep, and wake up feeling pretty crummy.  But you are not going to be here for the real tough times that are coming, and since you have no children, who cares?

Yes, your final years may not be as pleasant as you once envisioned.  But you still have time to sell the stuff, dump the house, and move to someplace warmer – The Dominican Republic, Panama, Belize – they will all still welcome you.  As long as Social Security is intact to supplement what you can gather up after your North American liquidation (which is still a bundle in much of the world, even after the housing downturn), you will be able to live in a decent manner and still afford local medical care (often quite good, Captain Midnight understands), and to get drunk much of the time.  For you, why worry?

By the way, if this applies to you, and you are still in the US of A, Captain Midnight wonders why.  Getting out of Dodge after partying hard and shooting up the town is only good for a short while, cowpunchers.  Then the sheriff shows up, with the angry citizenry behind, and its fines from the judge, hoosegow time for the obstreperous, or worse for the most miscreant  – with worse being a short walk to a long drop.  If you are one of the cowpunchers who brought in the herds, and then partied hard, maybe it’s time to grab your bedroll and what’s left of your poke, saddle your horse and hit the trail while you still can.  Because Captain Midnight might have seen some folks getting some torches and ropes from out of the back of the general store, and it looked like at least some of them had shotguns.

Now, for those readers who are younger, and especially those with children, the story is different.  For you, the future writ large still exists.  We’ll get back to what you might consider doing after we take a deeper look at what’s up ahead.  As the military minds are fond of saying, let’s put the bottom line up front.

The short answer to that question is simple: dark and dangerous times are at hand. (Somehow Captain Midnight thinks that it seems strangely fitting that the shirt is sold out.)

Dark and dangerous times, indeed, as that is exactly what the degrees of downturn implied by the wave theorists so clearly indicate.  We are in for a dark age, of uncertain, but not short, duration.  In fact, we are probably in for a Dark Age, capitalized, in the style of those who make special study of these momentous times.  And Captain Midnight proposes to do just that, or at least, to look over the shoulder of such a scholar, to see what we might see.

To that end, let us spend a few moments with the work of Sing C. Chew, PhD, a senior research scientist in the Department of Urban and Environmental Sociology, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ, Leipzig, Germany and professor of Sociology at Humboldt State University, Arcata, California.  Captain Midnight will draw now from Dr. Chew’s volume The Recurring Dark Ages: Ecological Stress, Climate Changes, and System Transformation published by the AltaMira Press in 2007.

In this volume, he lays out the thesis that “…Dark Ages over world history…are significant moments in human world history, for they are transitional phases of system transformation.  It is [his] belief that Dark Ages (as historical events and as a theoretical concept) are critical crisis periods in world history over the course of the last five thousand years when environmental conditions have played a significant part in determining how societies, kingdoms, empires, and civilizations are reorganized and organized – Dark Ages – are periods of devolution of human communities, and as such from the perspective of human progress, a period of socioeconomic and political decay and retrogression.  However, Dark Ages are periods of the restoration of the landscape, which are a consequence of the slowdown of human activities.  In short, Dark Ages rejuvenate Nature but are bad for Humans.” (p. xvi)

Right, then.  So, along comes a Dark Age.  What happens?

After examining a number of writers on the subject of Dark Ages broadly confirmed to have been visited upon the ancient world, Dr. Chew provides this synopsis of the general trends that characterize Dark Ages.  They are:

- Economic slowdowns and trade disruptions

- Political unrest and breakdowns

- Reduced social stratification and social simplification of lifestyles

- DE urbanization

- Increased migration

- Population losses

He additionally spends much of the book revealing the scale of ecological degradation – periods of both ecological crisis and climatological changes. (p. 10)  He also notes that “[d]epending on the systemic connections of the world economy at a particular point in time, and the level of intensity of the Culture-Nature relations experienced by a given region, the extent of impact of a Dark Age period is uneven.

The state of crisis and/or transformation appears to have its greatest impact on the regions of the world system that are considered the core(s) of the system at a specific point in time.” (p. 11)  He also notes that “Over world history, such Dark Ages, or prolonged periods of widespread social and economic distress and ecological crisis lasting for centuries, are rare.” (p. 6)  Sadly, it seems to Captain Midnight, we are in for one but good starting ‘long about now.  (In fact, a case can be made it started a decade ago, but that is grist for another mill.)

All good stuff, the above synopsis, but dry.  To support his case, the good professor quotes the work of several others describing the Greek Dark Ages – a period of time in Greece’s prehistoric history (yes, it does seem silly to write it that way, but just because the participants weren’t writing much of anything down didn’t make the time less historical, now, did it?)  (N.b.: Captain Midnight is not going to go through the whole sub-citation of citations business, but rather will synopsize the points from the writers the good professor quotes.  If you want to read the original texts, go support your local library and read the original book, or better yet, buy a copy for yourself and support the writer.  ‘Nuff said.)

Stepping into the wayback machine, we learn that there in prehistoric Greece’s Dark Age:

- Craftsmen and artists seemed to vanish, almost without a trace

- There was very little new stone construction of any sort

- Metal-workers’ techniques reverted to primitive

- Potters seem to have lost their inspiration

- The art of writing was forgotten

- By the end of the 12^th century B.C. the population had dwindled to about 1/10th of what it had been but a century prior

- Living standards fell significantly

- It is probable that the total sum of wealth in society also fell

- Contacts, commercial and otherwise, were generally severed with most peoples beyond the Aegean area and even with some of those within it

- Art, such as it was, rarely saw representations of humans

- There was a dramatic decline in the number of occupied sites

- There were no signs of political centers of regional control

- All the luxury arts vanished: jewelry, mural paintings, engraved precious stones and seals, sculpted ivory, etc.

It’s a pretty bleak list, notes Captain Midnight.  Now we must remember that the ancient Greeks then were starting from the level of the Mycenaean Age.  The changes spoken of represent the times between the bronze age and the iron age.  Today, we are a bit beyond that starting point.  Still, that is a fairly stunning picture of a Dark Age.  A cessation of almost all things political and economic, and a focus on year to year local survival by a much diminished pool of the population.

In point of fact, Captain Midnight challenges all reading this to take a good hard look at what is happening around you.

A damn good case can be made that we are already about a decade into a Dark Age.  Listen, these things don’t happen overnight.  The light doesn’t go out all at once.  All you preppers out there?  All well and good, but this is a MULTI-GENERATIONAL challenge.  It is not going to get better again in the lifetime of anyone alive while Captain Midnight is writing these words.  It probably won’t get better for several seculae – the time period of several full lifetimes, end to end.  That’s the nature of Dark Ages with capital letters, kids.  And we are almost certainly entering one.  It is going to be a nasty ride.  There are unlikely to be very many happy endings. 

The most important thing that you can do, gentle reader, is to understand this fact.  It will raise you above the delusional level of thinking engaged in by all but a mere handful.  It will enable (some of) you to begin, slowly, carefully, to take steps to position yourselves so that you, and ultimately your progeny and lineage, come out on top when the lights come back on.

Why are the Rothschild’s so very, very wealthy?  Because a long time ago, generations back, they decided to be the winners of this age. And they worked diligently (for the most part) to position their family, generation after generation, where they needed to be, and doing what they needed to do, to be the winners.  They understood the thrust of the times, and positioned themselves to master them.  Like a surfer who saw a huge wave way outside, and paddled out to catch it, while the rest of the pack ignored it until it is too late, they caught the wave of the modern era, and have ridden it in to shore, while the rest are still tossed about in the foam.

We are now about to see that wave sweep back to sea.  Some will survive.  A handful will make out OK.  Many will simply be swept away and lost at sea.

Captain Midnight wants as many of you gentle readers as possible to be among the survivors.  To that end, these missives are being written.  In this first, Captain Midnight has called your attention to the true nature of what is going on around us all.  Head’s up!  Outside!  It’s the big one!

In future cogitative missives, the Captain is going to discuss, as clearly as possible, what might be done to position one’s family so as to best manage the turbulent age we face.  The wise reader can probably begin to see the emerging way ahead just from this scroll, however.

Until next time, keep your powder dry and your hatchet scoured, and stay alert.

Captain Midnight out.

If the idea of an emerging New Dark Ages sounds a bit…well….much,don’t feel bad.  Like the chances of nuclear war, pole shift, or other “really bad hair day” outcomes, people shun talking about a new dark age.  Just because we don’t want to look the most terrible of grim possibilities in the eye, however, has absolutely zero impact on changing its probability of occurrence.

We hope that there’s a workaround which can avoid the Dark Age outcome, while at the same time providing a work around from our next economic crash doing nothing more than rebooting the system of power, control of food, money, and the warring between humans as methods of control once again.

These are different times, than previous “end times” that crypto archaeologists write about: We have an Internet and even if we’ve given up (for now) on engineering our way off this rock, there’s plenty of exploration yet to be done between our ears and in our hearts.

Perhaps if we’d done those first….but then again, we’re on a razor thin edge right now:  The distinction between global mass consciousness and mob rule may come down to the availability of rope and sharp implements.

Hang on and enjoy the ride,

The Two G’s – George & Gaye

Recommended Reading:

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The Ready Store Welcomes Strategic Living

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Strategic Pick: The Strategic-Living Gear Bag

Just in time for our launch, the Strategic Living Kit from Survival Gear Bags. Talk about two heads getting together to come up with the ultimate gear bag! We spent a bit of time coming up with a checklist of things we would want with us if we were either stranded (say in a storm), in a wreck (heaven forbid a “ditch the plane” situation), or even in a bug out situation.

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