The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse

[Klaralven]

Peter turchin, one of the world’s experts on pine beetles and possibly also on human beings, met me reluctantly this summer on the campus of the University of Connecticut at Storrs, where he teaches. Like many people during the pandemic, he preferred to limit his human contact. He also doubted whether human contact would have much value anyway, when his mathematical models could already tell me everything I needed to know.

But he had to leave his office sometime. (“One way you know I am Russian is that I cannot think sitting down,” he told me. “I have to go for a walk.”) Neither of us had seen much of anyone since the pandemic had closed the country several months before. The campus was quiet. “A week ago, it was even more like a neutron bomb hit,” Turchin said. Animals were timidly reclaiming the campus, he said: squirrels, woodchucks, deer, even an occasional red-tailed hawk. During our walk, groundskeepers and a few kids on skateboards were the only other representatives of the human population in sight.

The year 2020 has been kind to Turchin, for many of the same reasons it has been hell for the rest of us. Cities on fire, elected leaders endorsing violence, homicides surging—­­to a normal American, these are apocalyptic signs. To Turchin, they indicate that his models, which incorporate thousands of years of data about human history, are working. (“Not all of human history,” he corrected me once. “Just the last 10,000 years.”) He has been warning for a decade that a few key social and political trends portend an “age of discord,” civil unrest and carnage worse than most Americans have experienced. In 2010, he predicted that the unrest would get serious around 2020, and that it wouldn’t let up until those social and political trends reversed. Havoc at the level of the late 1960s and early ’70s is the best-case scenario; all-out civil war is the worst.

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. His models, which track these factors in other societies across history, are too complicated to explain in a nontechnical publication. But they’ve succeeded in impressing writers for nontechnical publications, and have won him comparisons to other authors of “megahistories,” such as Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari. The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat had once found Turchin’s historical model­ing unpersuasive, but 2020 made him a believer: “At this point,” Douthat recently admitted on a podcast, “I feel like you have to pay a little more attention to him.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/can-history-predict-future/616993/

[Blues Heron]

1. We need to drain the festering Military boil on the body politic

those warfuckers are bleeding us dry

They're hogging all our healthcare/infrastructure/social services money so they can wave their dicks around all over the planet.

[Klaralven]

2. According to Turchin, war is very important

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. Instead, democratic societies flourish because they have a memory of being nearly obliterated by an external enemy. They avoided extinction only through collective action, and the memory of that collective action makes democratic politics easier to conduct in the present, Turchin said. “There is a very close correlation between adopting democratic institutions and having to fight a war for survival.”

Consider that WW I & II drove many of the technological inventions that made the second half of the 20th Century possible. Just one, the Haber-Bosch process for using natural gas to capture atmospheric nitrogen as ammonia for use in munitions, has led to vast production of artificial fertilizers. It is estimated that half of the atoms of nitrogen in the proteins of the human body have been captured from the atmosphere using Haber-Bosch. Prior to WW I, Europe's population exceeded the carrying capacity of European agriculture. In fact, a large part of the victory over Germany was due to the British Navy blockade of Germany's food imports which essentially starved Germany into submission. With artificial fertilizers, European agriculture is now in surplus, even though the population is much larger.

[Blues Heron]

3. Tell that to an afghan wedding party (or the survivors)

Tell them that according to you, they needed to die so we could enjoy the benefits of GPS. Hint - you might not like their response...

[jimfields33]

4. The minute you mention pulling out Troops in Afghanistan and Iraq

You see a whole slew of politicians say, “stop!” Recently just occurred. I’m afraid we could be there as long as Japan and Korea....meaning forever.

[Blues Heron]

5. Somehow we need to extricate ourselves from this violent posture

It's intolerable

[meadowlander]

8. I don't think it's just a memory of nearly being obliterated.

I read that a lot of the Scandinavian and Polynesian countries have a cultural memory of sea exploration where people had to work together because they were literally all on the same boat and would die if they didn't.

So single payer health care goes down a lot easier in countries like Sweden and New Zealand where there is a cultural focus on the benefits of collective effort to the general society.

I guess that's a different kind of "fighting" for your collective lives.

[BootinUp]

6. interesting. reminiscent of Hari Seldon. nt

[Klaralven]

7. From the article -

Diamond and Harari aimed to describe the history of humanity. Turchin looks into a distant, science-fiction future for peers. In War and Peace and War (2006), his most accessible book, he likens himself to Hari Seldon, the “maverick mathematician” of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, who can foretell the rise and fall of empires. In those 10,000 years’ worth of data, Turchin believes he has found iron laws that dictate the fates of human societies.

But the article fails to give a nod to another Russian, Nikolai Kondratiev, economic theorist of long, cyclical waves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Kondratiev