What Does the Grey Age Look Like?

The grey age began some time ago, but no one noticed because it was a natural extension of the Enlightenment™ philosophy they had been living by. Perhaps Hegel was wrong and rather than thesis, antithesis, and synthesis we simply have a steady progressive toward illusion until it is replaced by something better.

Currently, our elites — those favored by the meritocracy/bureaucracy — are trying to come up with an alternative theory of what went wrong. If they make one that convinces a lot of people, they get to stay in power, because then we will think that what is going on came from an external source, instead of being a natural consequence of the rules of the elites.

Facing the possibility of being wrong, the elites and the revolutionaries (who are one and the same, removed only by level of economic success) have forced us to read between the lines and see what is held in common between all of the horrors they describe:

For sociologist Peter Berger, communism and capitalism both adopted a "sacrificial" conception of development in which myths of "progress" and "growth" claimed their share of victims, much as Aztec priests had once used ritual murder to propitiate the gods and save their civilization.

All the major transformations of the past were predicated on rapid economic growth, whether the increasing food production of the agrarian revolution or the incorporation of the Soviet Union into the industrialized world through its Five-Year Plans. Most versions of the Green New Deal adhere to the same growth paradigm, with electric cars filling the roads and more sustainably produced widgets circulating through the global economy.

A rising tide, it was once said, would lift all boats: economic growth would lead to general prosperity.

What do all of these things have in common? Faith in “progress” and “economic growth,” all of which require technology, but so do all other forms of permanent civilization, even if that tech is low-tech like basic agriculture.

“Progress” relies on the idea of a bureaucracy that in a utilitarian sense, increases the greatest happiness of the greatest number; economic growth requires a constantly expanding population of consumers and taxpayers.

The Communists and Consumerists have a common root: the Enlightenment™ philosophy of individualism, or the idea of individual choices coming before the need for social, natural, or divine order (Tradition).

Without the Enlightenment™ “liberation” of the individual from order, and the liberalization of the rules of that order, we would not have the modern world.

Like all changes, liberalization goes through several stages. At first, it brings immediate results because it incites mass mobilization of the population; later, it bogs down under its own weight, because distributing costs and benefits to a uniform level creates economic stagnation. Eventually, it becomes unstable because it has gone into debtor status and is paying people to behave as if it is working.

This leads to the point where people theorize about a fourth turning, when in fact they are merely seeing the late stages of democracy, individualism, and equality (D.I.E.):

I find it both fascinating and disturbing to observe the level of madness engulfing our world, as the sociopath class of mind manipulators and propaganda specialists use their well-honed psychological techniques to scare the masses into subservience and implement their diabolical Great Reset plan where we own nothing, they own everything, and our future is a boot stamping on our faces forever. They are using our willful ignorance, technological bread and circuses, inability to understand risk, and susceptibility to fear exploitation, to increase their power and control over governmental, financial, and societal levers.

They want us under-educated and over-medicated. That is how they broaden their wealth, power and control. None of what has happened since the Fall of 2019 has occurred by accident or due to bad luck. It has been scripted, according to the plan agreed upon by the global elites (Gates, Soros, Schwab, Bloomberg, Zuckerberg) and implemented by corrupt politicians (Biden, Cuomo, Newsom, Whitmer), captured bankers (Powell, Dimon), corporate shysters (Bezos, Musk), and of course the compliant fake news propaganda media (CNN, MSNBC, NYT, Washington Post).

No one can identify what is going on with any detail, mainly because people assume that it is not a linear extension of what began with the Enlightenment,™ accelerated with the French Revolution, took over the globe with the world wars, and beat back all competing models when the Soviet Union fell.

Why are the elites accelerating us toward tyranny? As Plato would say, two factors dominate: first, their rule has become unstable because they gave away everything to the drones, and second, democracy has driven everyone insane by making them into egomaniacs who lack existential purpose and therefore are never satisfied. We have made a toxic witches’ brew of humanity!

Even more, we are in the grips of a pathology of quantity over quality. We do not care who is correct in any debate, only that every viewpoint gets expressed, which like the economic stagnation of the Soviet Union causes us to stop caring about quality of analysis, wisdom, and expression. Instead we focus merely on including everyone, which benefits “progress” and “growth” together.

The grey age begins with a pathological pursuit of failed ideologies because they make large groups of people agree; this is the essence of utilitarianism. It continues because, as those ideologies continue to fail, their popularity causes people to look elsewhere for the source of the failure, in fact anywhere else but at the ideologies that caused the problem.

This takes us into a post-truth existence, a pure form of nihilism where since public truth is defined as what most people believe, and is always wrong, only private truths matter. Nothing we read, see, or hear can be trusted. Consequently, the Enlightenment™ arrives at its final stage: nothing is true and everything is permitted, including returning to a feral and atavistic state where we have allegiance to nothing but our small tribe, and view everything else as a lie and an enemy.