I've written quite a bit about Peter Turchin and his theories of societal upheaval, including a review of his book End Times. Very briefly, Turchin describes how mass social unrest and civil war typically erupt in a country using models of wealthy disparity and elite overproduction. He has applied his model to historical societies and it has been accurate looking backward to discover times of mass unrest and/or civil war; and looking forward he predicted social unrest in the United States during this decade. However, while mass civil unrest can be purely grass roots in its origin, civil war requires leaders and financial backers; and this requires a schism within the elites (i.e., counter-elites) to lead and finance a revolt or revolution.
Burning Platform has published an piece entitled "You Don't Need A Weatherman To Know Which Way The Wind Blows," which is the saying that gave rise to the name for the communist/Marxist 1960s and '70s terrorist group, The Weather Underground or Weathermen.
Although he begins his post discussing William Strauss and Neil Howe's generational theory of civilizational cycles described in their book, The Fourth Turning, most of his post discusses Turchin's ideas. He quotes the following from Turchin's book:
“When a state, such as the United States, has stagnating or declining real wages, a growing gap between rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, declining public trust, and exploding public debt, these seemingly disparate social indicators are actually related to each other dynamically. Historically, such developments have served as leading indicators of looming political instability. In the United States, all of these factors started to turn in an ominous direction in the 1970s. The data pointed to the years around 2020 when the confluence of these trends was expected to trigger a spike in political instability.”
And then the Burning Platform piece expounds on this, including the following:
The “Haves” have so much wealth, so much control over our media, so much unwarranted influence over our political system, so much dominion over our intel agencies and military, and complete domination over central banking, while the “Have Nots” have little chance to succeed or even maintain their standard of living, as their anger towards the “Haves” reaches the boiling point. You can feel it. It will only take one spark to ignite this powder-keg of engineered wealth imbalance to initiate Civil War 2.0.
And as he notes from Turchin's books, the crises that arise due to the immiseration of the masses and enrichment of the elites do not generally have happy endings: 75% of the time, it results in civil war or revolution; and in 20% of cases, the civil war dragged on for a century or more.
Lots of good stuff there, so be sure to read the whole thing.
Mine was funnier.
ReplyDeleteYes, it was.
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