Do Not Wish For The Sixth

There is a quote that only the rarest of rare ever come across, and when you do come across it, it does not read like history... it reads like the front page of whatever you looked at this morning.

The Comte de Saint-Germain gave it to the Comtesse d’Adhémar before the French Revolution swallowed everything and everyone she knew.

Kingdom, Republic, Empire, mixed Governments, tormented, agitated, torn; from clever tyrants she will pass to others who are ambitious without merit. She will be divided, parcelled out, cut up... the coming times will bring about the overthrow of the Empire; pride will sway or abolish distinctions, not from virtue but from vanity, and it is through vanity that they will come back to them. The French, like children playing with handcuffs and slings, will play with titles, honours, ribbons; everything will be a toy to them... the greedy will devour the finances. Some fifty millions now form a deficit, in the name of which the Revolution is made. Well! under the dictatorship of the philanthropists, the rhetoricians, the fine talkers, the State debt will exceed several thousand millions!

She asked him when she would see him again.

Sit with that for a second before you go any further. He is not warning her about a bad king. He is telling her the whole machine is going to cycle, and that she should not be around for the last turn of it.

Now read it again as an American.

Kingdom, Republic, Empire, mixed governments. We did not escape that sequence, we are just further along in it than we are willing to admit. We started as a republic and we run an empire, and we keep the republic’s vocabulary around the way a man keeps his high school football jersey in the closet.

From clever tyrants to others who are ambitious without merit. Tell me that is not the last four decades in one sentence. The operators got replaced by the performers. We traded people who at least knew how to run the thing for people who only know how to be seen running it.

That is the single most damning line in the whole passage, and it is the one nobody quotes. We tear down hierarchies not because we love the people at the bottom, but because it feels good to be the one tearing them down. And then we rebuild the exact same hierarchies with new names, new titles, new little ribbons, because it feels good to be at the top of them.

Same vanity, both directions. The revolution and the restoration are being run by the same appetite.

Children playing with handcuffs and slings, playing with titles, honours, ribbons. Everything a toy to them.

Look at what we do all day. Blue checks, follower counts, verified badges, job titles that describe nothing, pronouns in the bio, flags in the bio, degrees, credentials, awards that we give to each other. Ribbons. Every last one of them is a ribbon, and grown adults are willing to destroy their own lives defending them.

Saint-Germain did not say the French were evil. He said they were children. That is worse and it is more accurate.

Fifty millions was the deficit that justified the entire French Revolution. Fifty. And he tells her, calmly, that under the philanthropists and the rhetoricians and the fine talkers, it will run to thousands of millions.

It did. And ours has run to thirty seven trillion and counting, under the exact same cast of characters. The philanthropists who have never built a thing. The rhetoricians who have never met a payroll. The fine talkers who will explain to you, with great feeling, why the number does not matter.

It always matters. It matters the way gravity matters. You can argue with it the whole way down.

So here is where I part ways with the doom crowd, because this is not a doom piece.

Everybody wants to read a prophecy like this and get the delicious little shiver of the end of days. That shiver is just another buffet plate. It is entertainment. It costs you nothing and it changes nothing, and by tomorrow you will be back scrolling.

The end of days is not a date on a calendar. As above, so below... the collapse of a nation is the collapse of the individual, multiplied. A country full of people playing with ribbons produces a government that plays with ribbons. A country full of people who will not look at their own balance sheet produces a treasury that will not look at its own. The macro is the micro wearing a flag.

Which means the correction does not come from the top either. There is no election, no crash, no collapse, and no reset that installs discipline in a man who does not have it. Rome fell and the Romans stayed Roman.

So what do you actually do with a two hundred and fifty year old warning that landed on the nose?

You stop waiting for the sixth visit.

You get your own house in order while everyone else is arguing about whose fault the fire is. You get out of debt. You build a skill nobody can inflate away. You stop trading your attention to people who are selling you a narrative and calling it news. You quit collecting ribbons. You raise children who can think instead of children who can perform.

You become one of the very few people in the country who is not a child playing with handcuffs and slings.

Saint-Germain told her not to wish for the sixth because by then there would be nothing left to see. He was not being cruel. He was telling her that the time to move is while the warning still sounds ridiculous.

As above, so below
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