Life right now feels like that moment when your roller coaster car begins slowing down near a terrifying peak, and your line of sight finally captures the precipitous plunge lying ahead.  Americans know that what happens next won't be enjoyable except in that perverse way when abject terror floods the body with adrenaline.  Majorities or near-majorities expect imminent economic disaster, global war against nuclear-armed foes, and civil war here at home.  If that's "progress," then it's long past time to turn the country around.  Yet that's the thing with roller coaster rides: even if we hit the brakes now before cresting the summit, our downward acceleration is guaranteed — in one direction or another.

It's not as if the ruling class's "cult of expertise" provides any comfort.  We have a president who long ago lost his marbles, a vice president who succeeded in the political profession by excelling in the oldest one, a secretary of defense committed to promoting men in dresses, a health bureaucracy pumping citizens full of experimental drugs, a Treasury Department endlessly printing money, a Commerce Department prioritizing inflation-inducing "green" windmills over real economic growth, a homeland security chief dedicated to keeping the nation insecure, and a national police force that treats half the country as "domestic enemies."  It's almost as if whoever installed these yahoos into the highest positions of authority wanted obvious "fall guys" for when everything, well, falls down.

The Gateway Pundit recently ran an article reminding readers of an ominous analysis from a private intelligence outfit predicting a seventy-percent decline in America's population by 2025.  That Deagel Corporation forecast released less than a decade ago shocked a lot of people at the time, but in an age when Farmer Gates and Doom Fauci continue to promise incoming pandemics worse than COVID, the World Economic Forum's human sacrifice cult insists on widespread energy poverty and famine, and U.S.-NATO plays Russian roulette for fun and profit, apocalyptic population drops no longer seem so unimaginable from the top of this globalist roller coaster.  (Morbid side question: If Deagel's devastating prophecy proves right, will climate cultists still insist that only global government and micromanaged markets can save the world from destruction?  Arg, of course they will; even after killing off 95% of the planet, A.I. clones of Klaus Schwab, George Soros, and Barack Obama will still be blaming the remaining 5% for "hate" crimes, global warming, and "white supremacy."  Hustlers can't ever give up the con.)

A lot of armchair analysts originally wondered about Deagel's math, especially since the intelligence firm predicted steady or rising population numbers for Russia, China, and most of the Global South.  Did the private spooks expect a one-sided nuclear, biological, or EMP-inflicted war in which America's enemies were overwhelmingly victorious?  Or did they perhaps simply take the U.N., WEF, and Obama-deluded U.S. at their word when the West decided that its primary nemesis is bad weather?  If you eliminate hydrocarbon energies and non-zero carbon producers from the market, after all, then agricultural production drops dramatically, energy for home heating disappears, and the costs of manufacturing inputs rise exponentially.  Runaway food and fuel inflation all but ensures cataclysmic poverty, starvation, and a return to burning wood for heating (when smoke-filled skies will prove the toxic repercussion of tilting at windmills for energy).  

Maybe Deagel attentively studied the new-world-order master plans of the Marxist globalists running the West into the ground and realized that if they were successful with all their "progressive" promises, the obvious cost would be 70% of the population.  Just as the Mesoamerican Aztecs fought drought with human bloodletting, Western socialists know that a lot of innocent people must die for "hope and change."  No tyrant ever said Utopia comes cheaply.  Russia, China, India, and everywhere else where hydrocarbon energies are still valued as instrumental for prosperity and population growth can just sit back, watch the West commit suicide, and wave.

So here we are in this maddening doom loop, where a majority of Western populations know exactly what kinds of homicidal maneuverings their governments are up to and yet find themselves in straitjackets and chains should they dare to say anything.  If you object to the coming "green" energy–induced mass starvation, the zealots brand you a "climate denier."  If you prefer diplomacy to nuclear Armageddon, you get labeled a "Russian appeaser" or arrested for spreading "disinformation."  If you prefer free expression to government censorship, you're one tweet away from committing the made-up crime of "hate."  And if you still cling to the antiquated notion that the Bill of Rights is an integral part of U.S. law, the national security Deep State dedicated to monitoring and regulating your language, religion, self-protection, privacy, property, due process rights, and other constitutional guarantees has something to say: namely, that all civil, human, or otherwise natural rights — even when bestowed by God — are suspended during times of declared emergency or whenever else government agents decide to terminate them because they don't like who you are, what you believe, or what you say.  Bet you never saw that fine print at the bottom of the Constitution and stamped by the directors of the FBI, CIA, and NSA!

This insane Western death march has reminded a lot of insightful historical observers of the so-called Tytler Cycle, a description of the natural rise and fall of democratic societies and named after eighteenth-century Scottish lawyer and historian Alexander Fraser Tytler (a kindred spirit, if not true kin, to his heroic but fictional clansman of Outlander fame).  John Eberhard has written about Tytler at his website, Commonsense Government, as have Andrew Coy, Chris Talgo, and Emma Kaden here at American Thinker.  All these essays are excellent.

As an analytical realist, Tytler looked at history through a lens free from wishful thinking.  Every form of government, he argued, is "ultimately ruled by a single will," and, therefore, every form of government is "virtually and substantially a monarchy."  He may have had a sincere respect for republican virtues, but he knew that, however democratic a society appeared, a permanent Deep State still rigged the game.  Furthermore, he was certain that all great nations eventually implode from internal depravity and corruption: "It is a law of nature to which no experience has ever furnished an exception, that the rising grandeur and opulence of a nation must be balanced by the decline of its heroic virtues."  No matter how strong or principled in the past, no government will last.

Although it is not clear that Tytler actually delineated the "cycle" of civilizational growth and collapse with which he is generally credited, it seems likely that he would have agreed with its usual formulation: "From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to complacency; From complacency to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage."

Looking at that cycle, it is difficult not to see the shorthand version of events tracking America's meteoric rise and unfortunate decline.  From "a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" to a vast national security surveillance State dedicated to a "woke," Marxist religion, two-tiered administration of justice, political persecution, censorship, redistribution of property, and the racist proposition that Americans should be judged by the color of their skin, rather than by their characters or minds.  By every measure available, liberty and courage have been traded for complacency and dependence.  

But what about bondage?  Must we follow the Tytler Cycle to its completion and become slaves to a system we abhor?  Or do we have the free will to decide which direction this roller coaster will soon head?

My deepest thanks to J.C.R., D.T., S., M.M., R.S., E.B., and P.V.

Image via Peakpx.