“If that’s the end of time, I got a front row seat with a big tub of buttered popcorn and a greasy half-live chicken leg.” – Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues
A guy on a tractor just drove by yelling about the end of everything. I think it was Farmer Geddon.
I think that Turchin has proven that, at least in some circumstances, he can show when trouble is coming. Again, I’d like to see his database and understand in greater detail how it works, but if you look at
- Every elite scrambling for position,
- Every mechanism possible being found to extract another dollar from a consooooomer so that the Wealth Pump can be fed, and
- the current graph of the interest payments that the United States will have to pay sooner rather than later, it’s clear:
There Be Dragons Here.
How the crisis unfolds, however, is dependent upon the structure of society itself, according to Turchin. “ . . . we cannot understand social breakdown without a deep analysis of the power structures within societies.” Turchin even notes this about Barbara Walter: “This is where the analysis by Barbara Walter in How Civil Wars Start often becomes woefully inadequate, and sometimes outright naïve.” He skipped the part where she eats lead paint chips with her avocado toast, but, hey.
Give Turchin his props: he’s calling out mass immigration and stupid academics. I think he might be especially fun to hang with after a few beers.
This is what A.I. thinks Turchin and I having a beer would look like. Guess I’ll have to dig my mortarboard out.
But back to power structures. Big Government is scary enough, but when Apple® or Google™ is holding the leash, it becomes even scarier. I like capitalism, but what we have here is called by Turchin “Plutocracy” but I like the more common (in our circles) name of Kleptocracy. That’s what it is, really.
Societal power is now, really, in lockstep with the Kleptocracy. It has created this weird amalgamation of Leftist/Communist/Corporatist power. At this point, Turchin attempts to analyze the power structures of the United States to guess at what the future might bring, noting that his work is, “nowhere near advanced enough to achieve such a feat of modeling.”
Honesty.
I love it.
I’m going to take an aside here based on comments I’ve had so far in this series of posts. It isn’t communist or socialist to question the rules put in place by the Kleptocrats to pump more money to them. We haven’t had true laissez-faire capitalist system in this country since the 1880s, at least. Huge corporations are not laissez-faire – they’re government creations, and to be against them isn’t to be against capitalism.
I do think that we have the idea because a system has worked in the past that it just needs tweaks. That is simply not the case – our system has brought us to where we are today. Simple actions like having end-by dates on corporations, turning senators back to state-appointed positions, abolishing all Federal income tax and getting the primary funds for the central government from tariffs . . . radical ideas. But we have to stop the wealth pump, and true libertarians should be all over this because domination over liberty from a corporation is no different than domination over liberty by a government.
End of digression. Back to the book.
Why did the libertarian cross the road? “Am I being detained?”
The most common outcome, Turchin notes, is that lots of elites (and wannabes) simply realize they can’t be elite anymore. Obviously, this will be uncomfortable for many, many professors who now have to work 40 hours at Starbucks™ instead of handing out worthless anthropology and ancient Japanese literature degrees.
This doesn’t happen gradually. It happens when the University closes. As we’ve discussed before (link below on Seneca’s Cliff), things are built only slowly, but collapse in an instant. The extreme case, which is now very, very much on the table is that the elite positions (and some of the wannabes) are eliminated as a result of Civil War 2.0.
Who will lead that war? Probably someone on the fringe of the current Elite who is angry. Why from the Elite? They have connections and power that allow them to put together a credible alternative power structure fairly quickly. Examples from our history?
George Washington was as rich and famous as Elon back in the day, and it wasn’t a bunch of poor dudes that ran either the Union or the Confederacy.
Of course, an alternative is to shut down the Wealth Pump. I mean, it will be shut down one way or another, but if it’s done before things are in a ditch, it might be better, though I’m fairly certain the first wheel went into that ditch back before 1990. Turchin notes that he thinks if we shut the Wealth Pump down now, well, that turns Elites into radicals in big numbers and will result in an even bloodier war.
Astrophysicists started a radical protest group: Black Matter Lives.
From his study, the growth of violence and instability isn’t linear – it builds on itself like an epidemic – Turchin calls this the “virus of radicalism”. Turchin notes that: “As long as the power of revolutionary groups is less than the power of the state’s coercive apparatus, the overall level of violence can be suppressed to a low level.”
They want to stop the signal. But there’s one lesson that even the Soviets learned: you can’t stop the signal.
Why do the Elite so desperately want your guns? It gives the average American citizen a real veto over intolerable actions by the government. This is why the Left and Levis™ jeans want to take your modern sporting rifle: it makes you a more compliant consoooomer. And if they get the 2nd Amendment, the 1st won’t be far behind, because ideas like these are dangerous.
This explains all the effort in censoring places like this one. The ideas here are dangerous, and oh, so sexy.
Turchin’s “everything as-is” scenario shows “an outbreak of serious violence during the 2020s and, if nothing is done to shut down the (Wealth P)ump, a repeat every fifty to sixty years.” Civil wars are what turn radicals into moderates – von Clausewitz wrote about this centuries ago. Wars are won when the will of the people to fight is erased. Places like this one keep spirits high, and attack those whose goal is the destruction of our freedom and way of life.
I honestly hope Joe Biden gets better. And recovers from his dementia, too.
Who else have they attacked?
Turchin, writing before Tucker Carlson was fired, said, “Carlson is interesting because he is the most outspoken antiestablishment critic operating within the corporate media. Whereas media such as CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, and The Washington Post are losing credibility, among the general population . . . Carlson is growing ever more popular.”
Now that, my friends, explains it all, and Turchin’s comments show the real reason Carlson was silenced, and Turchin notes (as I have opined in some places) that Tucker is the real nucleus of the Right.
Trump’s real sins had nothing to do with January 6, it had to do with him not starting wars and actually trying to stop immigration, which the Wealth Pump requires.
What does Turchin say that history tells us (p. 223-4)?
- In 2/3 of cases, most of the Elite stopped being elite.
- In 1/6 of cases, the Elite was “targeted for extermination.”
- “The probability of ruler assassination was 40%.”
- 75% of cases “ended in revolutions or civil wars or both.”
- In 1/5 of cases, “the civil war dragged on for a century or longer.”
- 60% of cases led to “the death of the state.”
Grim. Really, really grim.
We are at the brink of a civil war. I’ve been saying that for years now. One branch of my family moved to the United States from Germany in 1890 because they saw a massive European war coming. They left 25 years too soon.
Seeing what’s coming isn’t hard. I can tell you the future in some instances. If I walk out in front of a speeding bus, I’m going to die. It’s not clairvoyance, it’s happening to us, right here and now. Just as my family saw the European war that would known as World War I coming, I am certain that we are on the steps to Civil War 2.0.
It took a lot to get this picture out of the A.I. – I can get the A.I. to draw everyone from Seinfeld, but it draws the line at Morgan Freeman.
I also cannot stress enough that Civil War 2.0 isn’t my wish, this is the data and there is, at this point, nothing anyone can do to stop it. I believe the road ahead will be more terrible in some locations than many can even imagine. I do still believe that on the other side, the torch of Liberty will still be burning brightly in a new world where what is True, Beautiful, and Good will be recognized as such. Why? Because in the end, Liberty wins, despite all of those who would try to steal it away – it burns in the hearts of all who I would call men, and is loved deeply by all of those who I would call women.
Which does not include Barbara F. Walter and her fat, lead paint chip eating face.
It’s a rare book where I put it down, look at the conclusions, and say, “Damn, I wish I had written that book.” Turchin brings it home. If you like reading non-fiction and are a regular at Wilder Wealthy and Wise, I recommend you read this one, though Turchin sucks at adding memes to his work.
