There is a saying that goes something like “Those who neglect the past have no future.” There is another one that says, “Those who do not learn from the past are destined to repeat it.” There are several variations of them. All are equally correct.

History tells us that every great nation has fallen, in one way or another, eventually. A few of them lasted significant periods of times, measured in centuries, but all, even the greatest, even the largest and most powerful, fell and were consumed. Many of them fell to invaders, but only after weakening themselves beyond repair first. Looking back, examining their past, before they collapsed, can tell us where our own nation is in that inevitable cycle.

There are warning signs; there are signals that repeat in these nations’ histories. Not every sign is present in all of them, but all of them share at least some of those signals, enough in fact, that everyone should be standing up and paying attention.

There are four signals that are most common. We are going to call these signs the Four Horsemen. You know. The symbolism and all. Blame the English teacher. It doesn’t really matter which one is which, so don’t ask. They are all bad.

Horseman number one is the most popular; he has been invited to all the best parties. He is Debased Currency. All his friends call him Fiat. Now, for those of you who don’t know what fiat currency is, let me make it simple for you. Ole Fiat keeps writing checks. He writes checks his butt can’t cash. In other words, he doesn’t have anything in the bank. What he does have is a printer is his basement. As long as people keep accepting his checks, he’s fine. Eventually, though, they are going to demand a different form of payment. Then, he’s screwed. Any country that keeps printing money with nothing in the bank to back it up, is just looking for trouble.

I won’t go into detail here; the documentation is easily available. The list of nations guilty of this is long. The important thing to note is that at no time, never, ever in human history, has a nation, a society, survived debasing its currency by more than two hundred years.

Never.

Ever.

No exceptions.

Any and every people who have ever ‘fiddled with’ their money have destroyed themselves by doing it. Nor has any nation, that we can discover, once set on this path, ever reversed their actions and saved themselves from disaster.

Horseman number two comes in when there is a decline in productivity; industry, manufacturing, agriculture and the like. He has a few names, but we know him best as Unemployment. He includes in his minions those who leave the workforce willingly, to sit at home. No nation that allowed its non-productive population to outnumber and/or overpower its producers survived for more than a few decades after that Horseman came to town.

It is not coincidence that the first Horseman, Ole Fiat, enables a society to at least temporarily support the ‘takers’, at the expense of the ‘makers’ much longer than it can last with a sound monetary system.

A third Horseman is a lost national identity. We will call him Ex-Pat. Once a common identity, a consistent national ethos, is diluted the society is doomed. When the population devolves into separate cultural identities, a “we-versus-them” mentality prevails. There is no unity, only diversity and division. A society of people who fear, mistrust and hate one another cannot function together and make a nation.

In other words, when Patriotism dies, the country isn’t far behind.

The final Horseman, and this is a biggie, is the enslavement (or attempted enslavement) of the masses by an elite. This is where the kings and the bankers come in.

Or even the career politicians and the corporate overlords.

When CEOs, thirty-year Senators, and billionaires position themselves above and immune from the laws that govern the general population, particularly a population who was once free of such control, destruction follows. People can and will only take so much. When the elite stop caring about the masses and use them only as tools rather than seeing them as human beings, it’s over. The fat lady, or Horseman, in this case, has sung. In some instances, the collapse has been deferred for lengths of time, sometimes even centuries. Yet eventually, inevitably, the people will have had enough.

These Four Horsemen are the tipping points that signal a nation is in its death-throes. History tells us that once reached, there is no turning back, no salvation. We will be back to discuss this again. Think on it a while.

Until next time. Later, y’all.