This article was originally published by Chris Martenson at PeakProsperity.com
Do you have the nagging sense that our empire is in decline?
If so, don’t be embarrassed by it. Historically speaking, we’re in very good company. Far larger and longer-lived empires than ours have come and gone over the millennia.
This was hit home for me on a recent trip. I scored a major “dad win” by taking my youngest daughter, Grace, to England for her 18th birthday (we live in Massachusetts, USA).
All on her own, Grace developed an abiding love of mythology at a very young age: Greek, Roman, Norse, Native American, Aztec…you name it. She’s read the Iliad four times, a different version each time, as each has the biases of the translator subtly woven throughout.
Naturally, her dream mini-vacation involved going to the British Museum where the Rosetta stone lies, along with Viking hoard treasures and every possible Roman, Greek and Egyptian artifact one could hope to see.
The British empire came of age at the perfect time to muscle in and “retrieve” the cultural treasures of many different countries. Such are the spoils of empire.
Who knows, perhaps one day we’ll see sliced off segments of the Palace of Westminster on display in Cairo’s main square. History ebbs and it flows. Back and forth. Victors and losers swapping places over and over again.
If the British Museum reveals anything it’s just that. The long sweep of human history shows us that the more things change, the more things stay the same.
The treasures on display at the British Museum also show us that every race and culture has revered beauty. The most intricate and delicate and objectively beautiful jewelry and adornments were worn by kings and queens, priestesses, nobles, and warlords alike.
Sutton Hoo
Consider the find of the Sutton Hoo burial mound. An eminently important and revered individual (possibly Raedwald) was buried sometime around the year 740, with an enormous ship 89 feet in length serving as his burial chamber.
Just imagine how many people it took to dig a hole in the ground that held the ship to its gunnels, and then bring forward enough earth to cover the whole affair in a gigantic mound of earth more than ten feet high in the middle. As a gardener, I can tell you that dirt is heavy stuff that really resists being moved by hand. Hundreds of people must have labored for a very long time to create this burial mound.
Whoever this person was, he was revered enough to be buried with an astonishing collection of wealth. And, perhaps more amazingly, none of it was looted.
Here’s the sword belt, made of an intricate lattice of pure gold and polished garnet:
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Isn’t that a beautiful work of art?
Again, nobody came back and looted this afterwards. Maybe they killed the workers who built the gravesite, but surely folks still knew a very rich ruler had been buried in the area. And yet nobody looted the site. To me, it’s hard not to see that as a sign of how much the man buried there was respected by his kinsmen.
Here’s a close up of the dragons head from that sword belt:
If you’ve ever worked with garnet, you know just how devilishly hard it is (a 7.5 on a scale of 10) and how much work it must have taken to polish up even one of those tiny panels, let alone all of them, and into such careful shapes.
Similarly, these shoulder clasps meant to secure an article of clothing (like a cape or cloak) are also magnificent:
Again, the detail and workmanship are impressive. But what struck me most was how these works of art are so … beautiful. And from a time of early medieval history referred to ‘the dark ages’ and popularly described as a period of bleak survival.
If they were, somebody still had the resources to churn out works of extraordinary precision and beauty. That much is clear.
The rest of the artifacts are similarly extraordinary — especially the helmet, shields, and coinage. Just take a look at this purse lid:
Taken together, I see a culture where reverence mattered. Sutton Hoo’s buried leader was revered enough that his tomb was not looted afterwards, promptly or otherwise. The items buried display a reverence for his authority as well as for beauty.
These burial artifacts were by no means trivial items. Each one could have supported a family for many generations at a time when resources were scarce, only obtainable through the hard labor of many.
And yet they were left untouched. Who among today’s leaders would be honored enough as a leader that their tomb would not be looted for massive personal gain? Where can you see that our culture reveres beauty to the same degree, being willing to place so much collective effort into its creation?
The Taranto Scepter
Everywhere else in the British Museum were similar displays of honoring the feminine — the women and the goddesses of the world. Many of the Egyptian displays caught my eye, as did the Greek, but one piece stood out so much that I came back to it three times, so amazed was I by the beauty of it and the message I took from it.
It came from “The Tomb of the Taranto Priestess” and dated from 350 – 340 BC. Since kings did not rule Taranto during that period, it is believed to have been the property of a priestess.
First, her scepter is truly extraordinary:
The entire scepter is perhaps 18 inches in length and capped in extraordinary gold adornment. But what really caught my eye is the gold mesh you see running down the shaft (lost to history, thought to have been bone?). It consists of extremely fine gold wire wrapped in even finer gold wire, and is woven into a meshwork of little diamond shapes with tiny circles at their corners. Each of these circles contained a tiny gem or enameled treasure of some sort (most, again, lost to history).
Here’s a close up:
The gold wire used is finer than hair. This scepter speaks of power and delicacy in equal balance, one reinforcing the other. Only the lightest of touch could hold the scepter without breaking strands of gold that fine. That made me think of the woman who wielded it with such a delicate touch.
Again, this person was revered to such an extent that an object of such immense value and beauty was entombed with her, and not robbed at a later time by someone who knew what the tomb contained.
Power, honor, reverence, and beauty. All attributes that show up again and again all throughout history.
The entire British Museum is packed to the rafters with such expressions. I came away both elated to have gotten back in touch with these better expressions of humanity, but also saddened because I can’t locate their equivalent in today’s world.
One missing element from today? Reverence for the goddess, for the feminine. I cannot think of a single western homage paid to the feminine. No temples to the goddesses and no elevation of feminine attributes.
This is important to note, not because we wish to bash the masculine, but because anything out of balance requires rebalancing. In fact, re-elevating the feminine will actually bring honor and meaning back to the masculine.
Our world is caught up entirely in money, and power, and wars, and force. We revere power over rather than power within.
So the questions I’d like to leave you with are these.
- Where do you have beauty in your life? Do you consciously manifest it?
- What do you revere?
- How honorable are you?
- Do you instill a sense of loyalty in those around you? Who would rob your grave and how quickly after you passed?
- Who do you honor, and how? Also, why?
- How important is it for you to be surrounded by people you can trust, and whose opinions you trust?
- Where and how do you respect, honor and encourage the feminine in yourself (whether you are male or female), in others, and especially in nature?
Finally, are you ready for the massive changes that are coming?
Our Empire Of Debt
The British museum is a testament to the fact that empires have been rising and falling for thousands of years. The common elements of every empire include its own appreciation for works of extreme beauty and human craftsmanship, along with strict hierarchy. They all expressed a strong connection to the divine, however they felt it, each with their own mythologies and attendant religions to make sense of it all…and help cement the rulers place(s) at the top, of course.
Each empire had a mythology by which it self-organized and people bought into that belief system. Looking back they seem like such obvious mental traps it’s easy to scoff and wonder how people could have been so blinkered.
Here’s the thing about hierarchical societies in every era…in every single one there were always a very few haves and a whole lot of have nots. How were the masses kept in line? Why did the vast bulk of humanity in every empire live in relative poverty and misery, never lifting a finger in revolt except under very rare circumstances?
The connection to yourself is this; each society has a set of reasons in place that explain to the people on the lower levels why they belong there. In some prior cultures the explanation was that authority was invested the royal blood line. You either had it or you didn’t.
In other societies, the rulers were said to be closer to the gods, if not descended directly from them. To go against the rulers meant you were assaulting or dishonoring the very gods you prayed to and on which you utterly depended.
While the mythologies in place “explaining” the hierarchy differed, the results did not. They always resulted in a few at the top and an expanding pyramid of population and entitlement laid out below them.
The middle management in this story, those that had relative advantage were the necessary keepers of the systems in each culture and each system. They had more to lose than to gain through revolt and so they stayed true to the system through their entire lives.
The people on the very bottom, despite having a vast numerical advantage, had the limiting belief that they had no power. So revolts almost never happened. Systems of hierarchy persisted until the empire had run its course, almost always failing because it ran out of resources to maintain itself and its growing complexity.
The lessons of history are absolute; nothing lasts. Everything changes, especially who’s in charge.
So what are our explanations today that keep us all in line? What keeps us from revolt? To what do we bow our daily collective heads in fealty to?
The answer is Money.
What we call “money” today was a wicked genius invention that popped up right around the same moment in history when humans were working out other keen, life-altering inventions such as clocks, and printing presses.
“None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free.”
~ Goethe
A person in debt is a person controlled. But they think it was their own decision. Hence the Goethe quote above. A nation in debt is a nation controlled. The debt trap is especially insidious, and it relies on the illusion of free will combined with the full weight of ‘the law.’
By attaching a stated rate of interest to a loan, a person’s future output was yours if you were the holder of that note. What a stroke of pure (evil) genius! Set the rate high enough and the term long enough and you can get all of your money paid back plus another 100% of that amount or more, every bit of which was actually the future productive output (i.e. time) of the borrower.
Conjure up a promissory note out of thin air and then you get to skim the true productive output of that person, regardless of outcome. Whether they succeeded or failed in the endeavor, you still won. If they paid you back, the win was obvious. If they failed you often had collateral on the back end protecting your “investment.” No matter what, you won.
And even if that wasn’t the case? Well, you lost the amount of effort on your end that it took to draft up the note. In other words, nothing really.
I’ve yet to find this laid out in any museum even though the introduction of debt-based money was arguably the most course-altering invention of the past thousand years. It transformed millions of human slaves kept in check by threat of power and physical coercion (if not death) into billions of humans perfectly willing to hand over their labor to a very few elites at the top who did little to no work themselves.
Before this transformative invention money was always a very concrete thing – you either had a stash of silver or gold or you didn’t. Afterwards money became abstract. You could loan someone something you never had, written on a slip of paper, and the belief invested in that idea was sufficient to enslave that person until that debt was repaid. “Your” money might never be seen or handled by you at all, which is true for most people today. It exists as digits on a statement or computer screen. Yours, but utterly intangible. A powerful force, never actually seen or handled. In other words, a shared idea. A mythology imbued with tremendous power by a culture that served to enforce the current system of hierarchy.
There is a vast empire now spanning the globe but the mystery of it all is that it’s not based on or in any one country. It is an empire of debt. Those issuing the debt are harvesting the output of entire nations, no different in final effect than the Romans enforcing the practice of tithing from extant countries in AD 100.
We now live in a world of, by and for bankers, and other financial elites. Where once it was your royal lineage, or direct connection to the sun god Ra that assured your place at the top, today it’s your proximity to the temples of money.
But what happens when the economic pie is no longer expanding, yet the keepers of the system seem unable to turn off their own desires to grab more, more and yet more from that same pie?
That is where we find ourselves today. The economic oxygen is being sucked from the middle and lower classes and the social and political pressures are building.
Meanwhile more and more claims (currency and debts) are being piled on top of this stagnant economic pie thereby increasing the pressure on a creaking system. Someday that all gives way rather spectacularly and ends very badly. History says it ends with a lot of social anarchy and quite possibly another world war.
In Part 2: What History Tells Us Will Come Next, we provide a detailed analysis of how late-stage empires always collapse as the elites exhaust the resources of the masses. We are seeing clear signs of that today.
As we progress from here, the disparity between the haves and have-nots is only going to intensify, with debt (and our debt-based money system) being used as the primary weapon for controlling an increasingly dispossessed public.
Are you prepared?
Click here to read Part 2 of this report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access)
I kept thinking when looking at the relics of Sutton Hoo “well, it sure has been looted now”. Rate things are going, someone somewhere is going to have Lincoln’s head from his statue on a coffee table used as a place for the TV remote and Grant’s Tomb will be turned into a car wash.
“A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.”
-Ariel Durant
65% of Public School 8th Graders Not Proficient in Reading; 67% Not Proficient in Math
—-“Sixty-five percent of the eighth graders in American public schools in 2017 were not proficient in reading and 67 percent were not proficient in mathematics, according to the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress test results released by the U.S. Department of Education.
The results are FAR WORSE for students enrolled in some urban districts.”
https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/65-public-school-8th-graders-not-proficient-reading-67-not-proficient
Free download of this book.
This book will change the way you view education.
The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America
http://it-book.org/pdf/the-deliberate-dumbing-down-of-america
America is already long since dead. We have two gigantic govt authoritarian parties fighting over the ashes and whole slew of imbeciles lauding them.
What we have failed to teach our children is the most evil invention of mankind is government. History can be boiled down to the following:
People start out tribal, then people merge tribes to start government for group protection, government becomes corrupt with power, government fails and tries to stay in power with wars, when wars fail they become dictators or oligarch’s to get the people to worship government, when this fails they commit genocide on the people who do not worship government to hold government together and lastly government collapses and people are once again tribal. Same cycle for the last 8000 years.
We are currently in the stage where they want us “to get the people to worship government”. This is why they must take our firearms. People with firearms are a threat to statist. Once they have our firearms we will be made to conform since we will no longer be a threat. That ain’t going to happen.
Rabbitone, you nailed it with that very good post. Not giving up my weapons either.
rabbitone: That’s why the E.U. transitioned to sharia law/ Islamic control as they allowed their globalist leaders whom they worship, to stay in office. No one resisted, and lawlessness runs rampant. People there are afraid to defend themselves even with knives or clubs. Males are sissified wimps. Decadence, stupidity and self indulgence adds to the problem. Younger people today are not taught anything of substance in any gov. schools except garbage (gay, LGBT agendas) and other useless trash, while churches remain silent because they are bought by gov. 501c3’s. Apostate clergy are muzzled and collect money from the stupid. Nothing politically can be done at this point, since Trump cannot stop third world trash from coming in and drawing welfare. All we can do is get house in order and prepare for a false flag and UN troops to over run cities and towns. UN guys are already here. MS 13 and ISIS will join in when the hammer drops.
Laura Ann what a great comment and hitting exactly on the populations downfall caused by government. I agree with you totally. This brainwashing garbage has hit here too. Sissified wimps is my main is my real thorn for how they have ruined the white male. Because we are the ones with our guns that pose them the biggest threat. Watch tv and pay attention to the commercials. Any white guy in them is the most pathetic excuse of a man ever!!! No muscles, a goofy white trash spotty pathetic beard, acts like a wimp and is absolutely useless. But holly weird has glorified this in everything and this David Hogg represented generation of pathetic weaklings love this perception and love to immulate it. Morals are gone. More like the moral compass is smashed and melted down. Everywhere you go tattooed up trash, people with no pride looking like trash, have no idea on how to raise their children. You think this wasn’t done intentionally? It absolutely was!! I really enjoyed your comment and post!
Laura: Western Europe is done – it is a total loss, a write-off filled with a bunch of sissy, queers with very limp wrists! All they seem to care about is the vile, filthy, disease ridden Moooslims and fags and he-she’s and fruits not sure what god damned toilet to use for Pete’s sake…WTF, WTF is all I can say and all of this nonsense is upon us in the U.S. Folks, if we do NOT stand up, the US of A is also going to be a complete damn write-off, total loss…time to genuinely make that Stand people.
Spot on and what a well wrote condensed statement summing everything up!! I agree with you totally on this!! Great job brother!!! And
RogerRabbit: Yup, you pretty much hit the nail on the head my friend. I can’t stand the Gov’t period…not local Gov’t, not state Gov’t and sure as hell NOT the U.S. Federal Gov’t good lord, what a bunch of crooked buffoon they ALL are. They have failed to serve the citizens – didn’t I read something about when Gov’t has failed the people or something to that effect and watering a certain Tree?? ringing any bells my friends? the time is not close, it is truly on top of our damn heads. And yes, I have been saying for about 20 years now, they want guns GONE!! Wake up folks and be ready to join the party…
Empires are overrated.
Get rid of the Federal Reserve. Bring back the gold standard.
Nation building here, not overseas.
Let each state fund its own infrastructure.
If Colorado wants to build a bridge, they can sell some bonds.
If some other state needs to fill potholes, thats on them. No more federal money.
If some states go belly up, so be it. Only the strong survive.
These bankrupt states that keep sucking off the system need to collapse.
2018, you mean all states run by libturds I take it? I agree if so.
If the end of the “American Empire” implies the end of TPTB then its most likely the end of the world. They, like spoiled children will break all of their toys before sharing them. I don’t see TPTB controlling China using them at their puppet as they do the US. TPTB will do anything and everything to remain in power consequences be dammed.
I don’t think so.
This empire can be “reset”.
Most of the debt this country owes, is owed to itself. Monetizing debt.
At some point in time the government will just clear away the balance sheet and start anew.
Yes, it will hurt, and yes, there will be major wealth lost, but it will quickly be re-established.
JS,
You are one of the few people that “get it”.
“We” owe the money to the bankers. The Federal Reserve isn’t Federal and there is no reserve.
K2,
Not really. We owe it to the people holding treasury debt instruments. If banks are holding that debt then we owe them.
US doesn’t go to the Bank of America and borrow 50 billion dollars.
It sells Tbonds at auction. If BOA wants to buy Tbonds then that is how the US owes them money.
The Fed and the Treasury debt are two different things.
At least that is my understanding as I started buying Tbills this year and looked in to it quite a bit.
How money is “created” is significantly more complex. There actually is a reserve as every federal reserve bank has billions in physical cash on hand. Go take Macro and Micro economics classes like I did and you will end up just as confused as everybody else.
rellik
Being a great amount of the debt has been monetized with QE then the US does owes it to the banks. Banks do not have vaults of cash to cover withdrawals as with fractional reserve banking its impossible. The very existence of money comes largely from debt. Far more money is loaned than what is in deposits. This is how and why we’re in trouble.
I stand by my no reserve; “Reserve” is crated from thin air as “needed”. They have money for ordinary transactions. What I know came not from formal education but reading, specifically The Creature From Jekyll Island.
K2,
I was trying to point out that Government debt is different from Bank debt. You are correct as to how banks increase the money supply.
” Far more money is loaned than what is in deposits.”
In the history of banking this how it always has been done.
Relik: Why in the bloody hell would you bother purchasing debt from this cobbled, fucked in the ass country?? MY God, what is wrong with you? Did you stop taking your crazy pills or something??
J Stiner- No. The wealth will not be re-established for millions of retirees.
They could lose everything. You expect someone to go back to work at age 85?
Fork was placed in it a long time ago.
The group that is trying to destroy America (e.g. build sanctuary cities) is the Soros Communist United Movement (SCUM). You will find that liberal SCUM are everywhere trying to eliminate freedom. They are being driven to do these horrible deeds by those preaching on their soap boxes or soap SCUM. We are all hoping and praying Mr Clean(Trump) can get rid of this SCUM before they come after you and I.
“Soros Communist United Movement” or SCUM. Rabbitone, you nailed it again. I like that one.
R’one: Yuup, SCUM bags took much of Europe down to a third world rat hole, now Muslims have free range to break all laws and infidels (Euro folks) are punished for even defending themselves. Globalist scum took over churches in the US (and the EU) decades back, to brainwash church goers to trust in works like giving money, membership,(1930s- worshiping Hitler, Mussolini), helping sanctuary cities they helped set up nationwide. I blame older generations older than B boomers for failure to instill values and fill in the gaps for history no longer taught in gov. schools.
Scum. Lmfao
RogerRABBIT: This is one way and one way only to deal with things and have us a nice, well over-due PURGE!!!!
Whether people want to admit it or not, we are in the end times. You won’t save this nation now, regardless of what you do. The dominoes have started to topple. End times wars are at our doorstep. Collapse has already begun.
Nothing new here…
this country is repeating the same things that brought the downfall of rome. debasing the currency, corrupt government and bringing in unchecked immigrants that do not share/adopt your values.
may still take a few decades or even until 2100, but the usa’s best days are behind it.
I have come to think of these as universal, human troubles, for all times.
People do still make these things, you just haven’t made up your mind, that you and yours will have one.
“encourage the feminine in yourself (whether you are male or female…”
Right. This is not healthy. This is one of the things that is destroying our civilization.
Rome fell because of many things, over extended itself. Rome got too big to manage.
Their were too many foreign people (diversity) rubbing against each other causing friction.
Debt, banksters, slavers, alcohol, lead vessels for drinking poisoning the minds of people, debotchery, perversion, and feminization of men.
It is not hatred to expect women to be pregnant and in the kitchen.
And it is not hatred to expect men to be brave, defenders, and leaders both inside and out
of the home.
Men don’t need to encourage their feminine side; women need to encourage men to be men.
Women need to encourage themselves to be more feminine.
Let the women “encourage their feminine side”.
__
Nation in decline. Too many takers too few makers. There hasn’t been, isnt now and likely never will be any viable political or ballot box solution. Government and individual debt keeps increasing. More restrictive revenue generating laws and infringement on freedom. So what to do? I suppose Go Galt? Maybe pray for divine intervention? Keep prepping?
Old Guy: Definitely go Galt, everyone get ready for the UN invasion of cities and towns. They will be joined in with ms-13 that will act as assassins on any threats to globalist takedown, and ISIS will create all the chaos they can while this is going on. Lock and load, and be aware of false flags.
“I Expect A Financial Accident To Occur”: Gavekal Reveals A New, “Flashing Red” Warning
“Should this spread move into negative territory, I would expect a financial accident to occur outside of the U.S., a U.S. recession, or possibly both.”
“Much ink has been spilled by analysts sounding the alarm over the rapid flattening in the US Treasury yield curve observed over the past year, as many have rushed to remind markets of the conventional wisdom that an inverted curve is one of the most reliable indicator of an imminent recession.
At the same time, others have spoken out against this orthodoxy, pointing out that there can be as much as a 1-2 year lag between the moment of first inversion and when the economic contraction officially arrives.”
ht tps://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-05-01/i-expect-financial-accident-occur-gavekal-reveals-new-flashing-red-warning
Direct link…
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-05-01/i-expect-financial-accident-occur-gavekal-reveals-new-flashing-red-warning
I do not like articles that require you to pay for Part 2, and I never will.
JAZZAK ALLAH…MAY ALLAH REWARDS YOUR COUNTRY WITH GOODNESS.
We are a long way from end times in America. This is only the sun setting on the wonderful run of freedom and prosperity we have had in America. Once the sun has set and the darkness of true socialism and world order has settled on America there will be a time of great suffering. If there are not enough patriots and common sense to defeat this socialist take over, the sun will never shine on America again and that will be the end times.
When the television show “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” aired on television, I was hoping that that would be the low point and hoped that things would turn around. It wasn’t and it hasn’t.
The golden relics of the past age were followed by today’s plastic junk. Plastic takes a long time to degrade so if there are future generations, they will have a lot to remember us by.
It’s not our Empire. It never was. The Empire (globalists,NWO) destroyed our country.
It’s not our Empire. It never was. The Empire (globalists,NWO) destroyed our country.
Bronze age, iron age, gold and silver jewelry. All the legacies of past ages as a testament to their greatness. We are leaving PLASTIC! Plastic bottles and every kind of junk. Even the oceans are filled with it. If there are future generations, they are going to wonder what we were thinking. Can’t change things so you have to look for the humor in it. Look, and look, and look. Can’t find any!!
Beware if the end times come, for this will be a time that the common working person will lose everything including hope. When the American people have nothing else to lose but their life’s they will rise up against the powers that be and were with a world class vengeance. When hope leaves anything goes.