by Charles Hugh Smith, Of Two Minds:

A Covid-19 vaccine, or lack thereof, will have zero effect in terms of reversing these cycles. Call it Fate, call it karma, call it what you will, but the cycles have aligned and nothing can stop the unraveling of all that was foolishly presumed to be permanent.

We like to think we’re in charge and that technology conquers all, but history moves in cycles that are larger than any person, corporation, elite or (gasp) technology. My first version of the chart below was drawn in 2008, when the Global Financial Meltdown revealed the cracks in the happy-story facade of permanent wonderfulness based on the amazing magic of borrowing / printing ever greater sums of currency, a.k.a. “money.”

Longtime correspondent Cheryl A. suggested I revisit the alignment of long-wave cycles, and so let’s start by what the study of cycles is not: it is predictive in terms of trends and turning points, not precise time or amplitude targets. In effect, the study of cycles is the study of human nature as it plays out in long-term social, political and economic dynamics.

Sir John Glubb’s succinct and deeply informed 1978 essay The Fate of Empires lists these stages of social development and decay that manifest as the rise and decline of empires:

The Age of Pioneers (outburst or Boost Phase)

The Age of Conquests

The Age of Commerce

The Age of Affluence

The Age of Intellect

The Age of Decadence

The slippery slope to collapse–decadence–is characterized by greed, corruption, irreconcilable internal political rifts, moral decay, frivolity, materialism–hmm, sound familiar?

The global status quo sped through The Age of Intellect (postmodernism) with little to show for the vast expenditure of resources, and is now firmly in the final terminal stage of decadence and collapse.

All of this fits the S-Curve model which I’ve described here many times, for example:

As I discussed a few months ago in The Taxonomy of Collapse (December 9, 2019), any number of events or trend reversals can trigger the rapid decline and collapse of what was widely viewed as permanent.

The book The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire makes a compelling case that the Western Roman Empire centered around the Mediterranean suffered from a slow environmental transition from an unusually wet era that enabled grain to be grown in previously marginal areas to a drier era that no longer supported the immense grain harvests needed to feed the empire.

The imperial machinery accustomed to there’s always more somewhere refuses to trim its expenses, elites refuse to lessen their skim, and since the fat of elite excess is retained, eventually the muscle of military power and trade decay, leaving a hollowed out empire on the edge of a precipice awaiting one final kick into the abyss.

The Covid-19 pandemic is the final kick into the abyss. Triggers of collapse can overlap, of course, accelerating the final decline, and hence our interest in long-wave cycles that align in the present era.

All complex, tightly bound systems are intrinsically fragile and prone to disruption; we don’t see the fragility or vulnerabilities until the decline has reached the terminal phase.

The higher up the wealth-power pyramid the observer is, the more prone they are to a magical-thinking belief that the status quo is forever, even as it is crumbling around them. I discussed this earlier this month in Our Inevitable Collapse: We Can’t Save a Fragile Economy With Bailouts That Increase Fragility (May 1, 2020).

Let’s consider the four overlapping/aligning cycles depicted on this chart. I could have added more, for example Glubb’s cycle of imperial expansion and decline, or Peter Turchin’s cycle of social integration and disintegration which he explained in his 2016 book Ages of Discord: human history manifests cycles of social disintegration and integration in which the impulse to cooperate in large social structures waxes and wanes.

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