Turchin founded a journal, Cliodynamics, dedicated to “the search for general principles explaining the functioning and dynamics of historical societies.”

One of Turchin’s most unwelcome conclusions is that complex societies arise through war. [...] Darwinian processes select for complex socie­ties because they kill off simpler ones. [...] Democratic societies flourish because they have a memory of being nearly obliterated by an external enemy. [...] “There is a very close correlation between adopting democratic institutions and having to fight a war for survival.”

Turchin’s prognostications would be easier to dismiss as barstool theorizing if they weren’t playing out now, roughly as he foretold 10 years ago.

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 fate of our own society, he says, is not going to be pretty, at least in the near term. “It’s too late." [...] The problems are deep and structural - not the type that the tedious process of demo­cratic change can fix in time to forestall mayhem.

“We are almost guaranteed” five hellish years.

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. [...] 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 overproduction creates counter-elites, and counter-elites look for allies among the commoners. [...] The conclusion that civil unrest might soon be upon us, and might reach the point of shattering the country. [...] Some periods were placid and others bloody, with peaks of brutality in 1870, 1920, and 1970, a 50-year cycle. [...] It wasn’t until the Progressive reforms of the 1920s, and later the New Deal, that elite overproduction actually slowed, at least for a time.

The final trigger of impending collapse, Turchin says, tends to be state insolvency. [...] Eventually the state exhausts all short-term solutions, and what was heretofore a coherent civilization disintegrates.

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

Kurzfassung:

5 heftige jahre Brutalität stehen uns bevor, weil ein Überschuss an Eliten herrscht, der zuwenig elitären Posten gegenübersteht. Es kommt zu einem Kampf um die höchsten Posten, Eliten vs. Gegen-Eliten, wobei sich die Gegen-Eliten mit den "Gewöhnlichen" (also dem Pöbel) verbünden (Populisten, Cäsaren, Trump gell).

Ferner erwähnt er auch Refinanzierungsprobleme des Staates, womit den Eliten die Gunst des Volkes entgleitet, da es nicht mehr mit ausreichend "Geschenken" ruhig gestellt werden kann. Es folgt stärkere Überwachung und Drangsalierung.

Aus meiner Sicht ergänzt dieser "Elite Bulge" den von Heinsohn ins Feld geführten Youth Bulge.

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Gruß!™

Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.

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