“The end time has come, not in flame, but in mist!” – The Mist
I once had shoes that had Velcro® closures. I mean, why knot?
I recently completed the book End Times by Peter Turchin. I have recently done a review of How Civil Wars Start by Barbara F. Walter (not that Barbara Walter, some other commie bimbo), and by comparison Ms. Walter’s book is a badly drawn crayon sketch of Donald Trump by a mildly developmentally disabled child who was born of the copulation of two stoned Leftists and raised on a diet of Trotsky and lead paint chips.
Her book was bad. Turchin, who I imagine is also Left-leaning, was (mainly) able to keep his political opinions out of the book, and produce something useful and as even-handed as he could make it, what with having to go to fancy university parties with the Leftist intelligentsia who are globalist and communist at the same time, because, reasons.
Going back in time, Turchin predicted in the early ‘teens (2010, I believe) that the decade beyond 2020 was going to be rough. This was based on an actual computational model, where he took various social factors, smashed them into a computer, and cranked out a slip of paper that said, “Beyond Here, There Be Dragons.” To be fair, his model seems to have some predictive capacity, though I have yet to find a place to tinker with it, but I’ll bet Ricky can track it down if anyone can. A .pdf that has a flavor of the model is here (LINK).
The XXX Files are a completely different subject.
His description of the model starts with one of the things that leads to collapse: Elite Overproduction. In this context, you pretty much know who the elite are. Donald Trump is one, and so are the Clintons, and the Obamas, and thousands of other wealthy, socially connected people who have political power. Per Turchin, only 9 presidents of the United States weren’t 1%ers, and before 1850, all of the presidents were elite and wealthy types and probably had exceptional hats, since they didn’t have other cool things to buy back then.
Turchin breaks down political power into four types:
- Coercion – Do it or else. Leftists love this. Think AntiFa® or the “new” Army.
- Wealth – Let’s face it, rich dudes rarely do jail time, and where exactly is Epstein’s client list and why can’t you see it?
- Bureaucracy – You own the organization that provide services or do stuff – think the IRS or the DMV.
- Ideology – This includes CNN® and Harvard™.
Where do psychics shop? The Seers® catalog.
In Turchin’s view, there are specialists at each level of political power. The big problem for people is when these folks are present in too large of a quantity and get bored and have to do something else. In 2016, we had a billionaire (Trump) running against someone worth in excess of $120 million (Hilldabeast). In no way was this usual, but later, billionaire Michael Bloomberg jumped into the race. Why? Bored, I guess. Most billionaires let other people do their fighting for them – like George Soros or Emperor Palpatine. But I repeat myself.
The key problem is that there are more elite people who want power than there are available chairs. That’s always the case to a certain extent, but with tens of thousands of Harvard© and Stanford™ and Dartmouth® grads fighting for elite positions in every facet of the coercion, wealth, bureaucratic, or ideological elite, well, this starts to drive instability, per Turchin. Per me, there seem to be a lot of people who have no connection whatsoever with anyone but themselves and their elite cocoon of friends with the same ideas and no-fat decaf pumpkin-spice lattes.
Turchin later goes on to talk about how the British killing off tons of French nobility during battles around 1400 to 1450 actually helped France to have a much more stable political period because there everybody had stuff to do other than try to overthrow the king or kill their brother or eat snails and smoke cigarettes while wearing berets and carrying baguettes of bread everywhere.
I once saw a baguette in a cage. I guess it was bread in captivity.
Yes, in the coming years at least half of the elite will either die or cease to be elite and have to drive Yugos® or Ford Escorts™ while working at JCPenney’s©.
There just aren’t enough chairs in the inner circle to go around.
So, we’ve got too many elites, which is one of Turchin’s factors that lead to societal breakdown. What else leads to problems? Turchin calls the next one, “Popular Immiseration” – bluntly, when life sucks for the common person. Another term for this is Bidenomics. Economic power of workers is disappearing, wages are going backwards when it comes to purchasing power, and jobs are more uncertain and awful.
To be fair to Biden, this was the trend even before he was selected, and was really the feeling that ushered in Trump. Trump was and is a reaction to the crapfest that the economy has turned into, and is more or less predictable. In 1956 Trump would have been a joke candidate, in 2000 Trump was a joke candidate, but by 2016 Trump was taken seriously because, to a large proportion of Americans, life is slowly becoming more miserable, daily. The needed someone, anyone, to listen to them and stop the nonsense that the Left (and, to be fair, the Chamber of Commerce Right) is shoving down their throats. Mittens Romney was just the same as the Left in his goals, he just used a different phrase to get there.
The last thing the American people wanted was ¡Jeb! To give an example from another period in American history that was in crisis, Abraham Lincoln was another joke candidate that fell into a period where he could be elected.
I guess Mary Todd Lincoln said to Abe that day, “Would it kill you to take me to a play once in a while?”
Turchin discusses Lincoln’s election not in terms of slavery, but in terms of economic misery combined with lots of rich dudes. Turchin adds in that the failing financial health of a country adds to this, lowering the legitimacy of the state.
These factors, Turchin notes, in every case that they’ve covered, always reach a breaking point within 200 years or so. This is in line with Strauss and Howe in The Fourth Turning and the theories of the unfortunately named Sir John Glubb:
It’s here that the Turchin takes a bit of time to discuss the nature of the American Empire, circa 2023. American power, he notes, isn’t based on religion. It likewise isn’t based on a militaristic history – although we’ve elected generals as president, the power of the American Empire is and always has been commerce. We sent trade ships in the 1800s across the world. Genghis Khan didn’t create his empire with trade, he created it with the sword and the horse and by having sex with half of the women in Asia. While the English used liberal amounts of gunpowder creating their empire, “I say, old chap, what are those Boer people doing sitting on our gold and diamonds?”, they were a commerce-based empire as well.
Me? I was upset when I got a pack of sticky playing cards for Christmas – I found them difficult to deal with.
I’d agree with Turchin – American power has been economic and, like the British before us, created an economic empire. The wealth from that economic empire thus created the ability for us to have really cool tanks and planes and aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons. No bucks? No Buck Rodgers.
Since it has been economics that created the empire, it’s economics that fuels it today: America is built on economics, and the biggest controllers of that are . . . rich people. As much as I’m in favor of capitalism (which is a lot) I can see that a system where the rich people get to make the rules is gonna suck for everyone else.
Turchin calls this the “Wealth Pump” – it’s the idea that the rules are set up not for the common citizen, but for the really rich dudes. What are some of the components of this Wealth Pump?
- Keeping a surplus of workers so that wages are lower. Unrestricted illegal (and legal) immigration? It’s perfect to keep wages down.
- What happens when we are need other workers than the illegals? Let’s cut all trade barriers so that a programmer in the United States has to compete with a programmer in Bangladesh. There won’t be any consequences from that, right?
- Larger companies that have greater pull – Steve Jobs said, before he died, obviously, that he couldn’t make Apple® again – there were too many barriers in place. Many don’t realize that large number of “consumer” or “environmental” regulations are actually welcomed by large businesses – they’re a barrier to entry and competition.
This is what the Wealth Pump looks like.
That the impact of the Wealth Pump is misery is a given. While (once upon a time) I was a libertarian, I’ve since moved on from that, as they’ve moved farther in support of this wealth pump. Freedom doesn’t come with mere economic freedom, and it doesn’t come from only from freedom from government coercion. Does it, in the end, matter if it is a group of elites in government or a group of elites at Google™ is the one censoring you to preserve the wealth pump?
Thus ends the first part of this review. More to come. I’m not sure if it will be one or two more posts, but we’ll get through it.
I’m a trained professional. Unlike paint-chip-eating Barbara F. Walter.
(FYI, when I get this finished I’m posting a link to it at Turchin’s blog. He’s got a better book contract, but I’ve got more readers.)
