06 March 2022

Portending an "age of discord"


Excerpts from an interesting article in The Atlantic:
The fundamental problems, he says, are a dark triad of social maladies: a bloated elite class, with too few elite jobs to go around; declining living standards among the general population; and a government that can’t cover its financial positions... The problems are deep and structural—not the type that the tedious process of demo­cratic change can fix in time to forestall mayhem...

Of the three factors driving social violence, Turchin stresses most heavily “elite overproduction”—­the tendency of a society’s ruling classes to grow faster than the number of positions for their members to fill...  In the United States, elites over­produce themselves through economic and educational upward mobility: More and more people get rich, and more and more get educated. Neither of these sounds bad on its own. Don’t we want everyone to be rich and educated? The problems begin when money and Harvard degrees become like royal titles in Saudi Arabia. If lots of people have them, but only some have real power, the ones who don’t have power eventually turn on the ones who do...

Elite jobs do not multiply as fast as elites do. There are still only 100 Senate seats, but more people than ever have enough money or degrees to think they should be running the country. “You have a situation now where there are many more elites fighting for the same position, and some portion of them will convert to counter-elites,” Turchin said.

Donald Trump, for example, may appear elite (rich father, Wharton degree, gilded commodes), but Trumpism is a counter-elite movement... Trump’s former adviser and chief strategist Steve Bannon, Turchin said, is a “paradigmatic example” of a counter-elite. He grew up working-class, went to Harvard Business School, and got rich as an investment banker and by owning a small stake in the syndication rights to Seinfeld. None of that translated to political power until he allied himself with the common people. “He was a counter-elite who used Trump to break through, to put the white working males back in charge,” Turchin said.

Elite overproduction creates counter-elites, and counter-elites look for allies among the commoners. If commoners’ living standards slip—not relative to the elites, but relative to what they had before—they accept the overtures of the counter-elites and start oiling the axles of their tumbrels. Commoners’ lives grow worse, and the few who try to pull themselves onto the elite lifeboat are pushed back into the water by those already aboard. The final trigger of impending collapse, Turchin says, tends to be state insolvency. At some point rising in­security becomes expensive. The elites have to pacify unhappy citizens with handouts and freebies—and when these run out, they have to police dissent and oppress people. Eventually the state exhausts all short-term solutions, and what was heretofore a coherent civilization disintegrates.

Turchin’s prognostications would be easier to dismiss as barstool theorizing if the disintegration were not happening now, roughly as [he] foretold 10 years ago...

One of Turchin’s most unwelcome conclusions is that complex societies arise through war. The effect of war is to reward communities that organize themselves to fight and survive, and it tends to wipe out ones that are simple and small-scale. “No one wants to accept that we live in the societies we do”—rich, complex ones with universities and museums and philosophy and art—“because of an ugly thing like war,” he said. But the data are clear: Darwinian processes select for complex socie­ties because they kill off simpler ones. The notion that democracy finds its strength in its essential goodness and moral improvement over its rival systems is likewise fanciful...

He opposes credential-­oriented higher education, for example, which he says is a way of mass-producing elites without also mass-­producing elite jobs for them to occupy. Architects of such policies, he told me, are “creating surplus elites, and some become counter-elites.” A smarter approach would be to keep the elite numbers small, and the real wages of the general population on a constant rise.
More at the link.  Embedded image cropped for size from the one at the source.

10 comments:

  1. I disagree that there is some noble, Darwinian good that comes from war. We need only recall the Fall of the (Western) Roman Empire to know that it ushered in centuries of hardship. If we came back better, it does not follow that it was due to the Fall of the Roman Empire. After all, we might have been centuries ahead of where we are now had the Roman Empire not fallen.

    The truth is that good things and bad come out of virtually any scenario.

    I ask my students what died on the fields of Gettysburg (or some other battlefields of earth). When I say to them that the "cure to cancer" may have died there, since some dead soldier, had he lived, would have had a child, who would have had a child, who would have...found the cure, they see the light.

    Sometimes, it is the sad case that wars are necessary. But I'm not sure that they always leave us a better world. That may be our relief that the conflict is over.

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  2. There are still only 100 Senate seats, but more people than ever have enough money or degrees to think they should be running the country.

    True that. But sadly, the mechanism that's in place does not yield to the best and brightest senators (and representatives). I'm sorry, but objectively, there's a bunch of unqualified idiots that are in Congress right now. There's a whole bunch of qualified people as well, don't get me wrong. But the selection process does not lead to the best qualified candidates.

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  3. Some of this seems to hinge on the premise that all people want power over other people. This tells us something about the person who wrote it.

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    1. Whether we "want power over other people" is less important, I think, than whether we HAVE power over other people. We are born into a complex, hierarchical construct, aka, modern civilization. Overtly or implicitly, there is a power dynamic in every action I take. Something as simple as throwing a pound a bacon in a grocery cart is made possible by a hierarchical arrangement wherein the pig in the gestation crate is down and the shopper is up. That is, hierarchy is the water in which we swim. With "other" people, someone is up the hierarchy and someone is down the hierarchy, as a matter of course. Is that "power over?" It is. The billionaire is up and their driver or gardener or chef is down. Further down is the person in some Third World country mining rare earth metals for use in the billionaires all electric Bentley--or my laptop. So, the questions the author is asking are about how this power will be distributed and the implications of those distributions.

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  4. That last sentence was what we had in the fifties when America had its strongest economy, highest taxes and increasing opportunities into affordable higher education.

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  5. So Steve Bannon acquired wealth well beyond his humble origins, but turned to hate speech and conspiracy theories because no "elite positions" were available to him? Not convincing for me -- this strikes me as a "just-so" story, where every bad actor in society is a "failed elite" (whatever that means) in disguise.

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    1. You might take the "bad actor" part out and just think of this as giant Machiavellian chess game, involving the psychotically ambitious across the political spectrum. Well, all of us, as we find ourselves trapped in the same game at whatever level we are, more or less, forced to play--short of seeking a hermit's life, deep in the forest.

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  6. I am reminded of the scripture that says "All things work together for good to them that love the Lord...."

    I think most in the Church world understand that this does NOT mean that everything that happens was ordained by God, but rather that, despite overwhelming evil, something good can be salvage from it, some good can come of it.

    But that doesn't mean that what happened was good!

    When we consider the story of Job, yes, he might have gotten back more and better, but despite all of that, there is no way he could forget, I'm sure, that he had lost ten children.

    Likewise, our world is, I trust, more sensitive to genocide after the Holocaust. But would anyone dare think or say that the Holocaust was therefore good? No! It was pure evil. But that doesn't mean that something good couldn't come of it.

    Every now and then (take the following in the way I mean it), the right person's child dies of some disease. While you and I might curl up and weep away the rest of our lives, their determination to see this disease studied and eradicated is ignited, and much good comes of it.

    But don't you know that they would happily return all the good that came from it just to have their child back again?

    Evil and hurt may not be justified by the good that comes from it. But perhaps it is in some small way mitigated or understood. If nothing else, it may be that what would have been a total loss is slightly lessened.

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  7. If there is anything less powerful than an elite, it is a "counter-elite".

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