https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=J3MvGkkAPAo
If we go back through history, I was thinking back through civilizations, perhaps the Romans or the Greeks. Have there been perhaps any signs in that that you’re aware of throughout history of civilizat- like signs that a civilization is on the verge of collapse? And are there sort of any patterns with where we are today? Yeah, there are several patterns. So you can see that towards the end of the Roman Empire during the crisis, right? It’s a, what do they call it, the third century crisis. There were certain things which were appearing, certain manifestations, and they’re pretty universal. There’s a, for example, there’s a reduction in birth rate. People stop having children. They become interested in strange aspects of sexuality. They become interested in strangeness in general. So there’s an interest in the bizarre and the perverse, in the upside down, let’s say the carnivalesque of society, the idea of Roman civilization and the kind of orgy culture you could say that was there in late Roman civilization. And then it leads also to a desire to- how can I say this? There’s also a fetishizing of the stranger. And so, for example, young Roman people in that time of crisis would dress as barbarians. They would take off the tropes of their enemies, basically. And so there’s this- there are many things that kind of signal the end of a civilization. And it’s not a- it’s kind of like a universal- it’s a fractal pattern, right? Reality has a fractal structure, you could say. And so you can understand, for example, that at the end of a year in a traditional calendar, you would have a carnival. And this is something that Jews, for example, have at the end of their year called Purim. And in Christian cycles, you would have something like Mardi Gras, or you would have the Saturnalia in the time of the Romans. So in- and during the Christian Middle Ages, around the time of the Saturnalia, they would have something called the Feast of Fools, or even the Feast of the Ass, like a feast of the donkey. So all of these upside down type of behaviors. And you can understand it also in the society as well. So think about like a town, and then on the edge of town, the circus will come, or a fair, and then there’ll be all this aesthetic of the carnival, right? And so if you want to understand what happens at the end, is you can understand it just in terms of how, though, the end of a year would manifest itself in a carnival. You’d have upside down behavior, you’d have lewd behavior, all of this kind of stuff that usually isn’t permitted in the society, would kind of come out for a day and parade around, and then after that, you would move to normality. And so that is- so that’s a good way to understand. You can say that our world is a carnival right now. Like there’s a lot of the aspects of our world as a carnival, but it’s a carnival that’s reaching towards the end. And so, you know, in the Saturnalia, it was actually crazy because what they would do is they would elect a slave, and they would make the slave into like an emperor figure, and they would spend a day of feasting and kind of all these sexual stuff that would go on. And then at the end of the day, they would just kill the slave. And it was like, that’s the end of the carnival. And now we move back to normal. And so what it feels like is that we’re towards the end of the carnival and the axis is like, is right there above our heads and is getting ready to come down. And we can see that with COVID as well, like the types of measures that are being taken with COVID look like a kind of authoritarian clampdown, which is on the horizon. And it’s being justified. It doesn’t matter. It almost doesn’t matter how it’s justified, right? It’s almost like it doesn’t matter how we justify the fact that this is happening. It’s just happening as a natural procession of a cycle, which is that after a carnival comes the shutdown, comes the, say, the hammer falls, let’s say. And so this seems to be, and that’s what, you know, if you understand World War II, that’s what happened just before World War II during Weimar Germany. Like Weimar Germany was, we’re like Weimar Germany times 10. That’s a good way to understand what’s happening in our society. You know, all the aesthetics of Weimar Germany, we are imbibing them, but like, you know, at a much higher level. And so then what comes after that is a clampdown, sadly, which might seem like at a much higher level than even what happened in World War II. It’s not I’m going to frighten everybody, but my purpose isn’t to frighten people. But I just wish people could be able to just see the patterns and to notice that these cycles, like I’m not making it up. Like this is something that happens at the end of civilizations. And I think that it’s very, it’s very eye opening to see those patterns and to kind of see where we are today.