Snow Peak, St. Joe National Forest

A book so interesting, I’m listening to it twice, as I digest the implications is Peter Turchin’s End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration. In this book, Turchin explains his approach toward cliodynamics — a new field of his and his friends’ invention about mathematical modeling of history. Turchin uses large data sets to identify large-scale trends in history, borrowing from his own background in nonlinear dynamics and chaos theory. He is down deep in empirical data, which has its problems. But his top-level insights are outstanding, and his book is well worth reading twice, if nothing except for the fact that it fits the historical moment so well. (I’ve attempted to contact him a couple of times, but he doesn’t write back. Which is a shame, as many of my more faithful readers know my own work in this field is highly complementary to his own.)

Turchin’s work is significant in that he tracks the rise and fall of elites in human societies, and their influences and antics. He notes there’s somewhere between a cycle of 50 to 200 years in which societies rise, and then must go through historic readjustment based on one important phenomenon — elite overproduction. The short version of this is that elites rise for various reasons, then have too many kids which want the same thing (or more) that their parents had, and then upon not being able to achieve this, form counter-elites and other disintegrative forces in societies. Polygamous societies, for obvious reasons, are worse than monogamous societies, primarily along the lines of one elite man being able to produce many multiples of offspring that a monogamous couple cannot produce. It would be fascinating to read Turchin’s cliodynamic analysis of Saudi Arabian society.

Along the way, what accelerates decline is creation of what Turchin calls a Wealth Pump — some mechanism that transfers wealth from the poor to the rich. This varies, obviously, dependent on the bases of the society, and is also driven by the number of elites’ children that need that Wealth Pump to insure their own entrance into elite society. We’ve seen this phenomenon ourselves in the last 50 years. Our own wealth gap has grown and grown, while the poor have grown demonstrably poorer, largely because of increased tuition costs at colleges and universities.

Turchin doesn’t talk about relational dynamics beyond his concept of popular immiseration — as the rich need more, they get more and make the poor more miserable. One can hopefully see how this separation might be attenuated a bit if we focused on empathetic human development. But this doesn’t fall under Turchin’s purview as a major factor driving societal evolution. And another factor Turchin ignores is the multiplication of psychopaths and their manipulation of mental models that also happen as societies stagnate. Considering the resurrection of racism through the drumbeat of anti-racism is a great example of this. Pot, kettle?

It was in Rob Henderson’s recent book, Troubled, that he introduced the idea of “luxury beliefs” — as elites ran out of money to buy goods and live lifestyles that appear elite, they tend to adopt beliefs to virtue signal to other elites that they were indeed part of that upper class. An example he explains in detail is the Defund the Police movement. Often these beliefs are sociopathic gaslighting, which the elites actually don’t adhere to themselves (he uses the example of decriminalization of drugs, which the elites can buffer, but is highly destructive to the lower classes.) But almost to a one, they are aimed at, if the poors follow them, immiseration to the lower classes. They’re a characteristic of how societies come to crisis. The basic pattern is this:

1. The elites overproduce kids.
2. The kids, having no truly economically beneficial way of becoming an elite, invent other high-status virtue-signaling modalities (think of the explosion of NGOs and their staff) to assure their position.
3. These kids create situations for depopulation/beat the shit out of the poors, or their own ranks (think wars here for the most basic form) until there are finally enough chairs in the crazy musical chairs game they’ve started so that they all have seats again.

These behaviors seem to be memetically coded into entire populations. Witness the current U.S. Presidential race for a great example. Using Turchin’s framework, it’s pretty obvious that Donald Trump is, at least, declared on the side of the peasantry and anti-immiseration, while Kamala Harris is solidly on the side of making those Deplorables pay for being deplorable.

Many of the various tricks we’re seeing on a large scale have been tried before. Importing labor from immigrants to do this is a classic modality, and one in play, with elites in charge ignoring whatever historic restrictions might have existed in order to secure slave labor for themselves. This augments their own Wealth Pump, as well as deplete jobs for the poor and lower middle class, driving down wages even more, which then directly contributes to immiseration.

This coupling of the Wealth Pump to popular immiseration has multiple forms. I hadn’t really considered it before today, but the entire transgender movement is an amazing example. The larger blob takes advantage of people with gender dysphoria (someone who believes they are a sex other than their birth sex) whose presence, both passive (just dressing up and walking around) and active (entering opposite sex restrooms, advocating for pedophilia) causes a lot of misery, as these codes are enforced top-down on the peasantry. Simultaneously, the mainstreamed surgeries and hormone treatments demanded by the gender-confused individuals further enrich the hospitals and medical staff delivering these surgeries. Since the procedures involve essentially lifetime medicalization, the money never stops flowing from the general population to this group of people.

Much of this involves chronic gaslighting of the public. I wrote about this in my most recent piece on the normalization of obesity through propaganda here. Even the prurient pleasure of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue has now been co-opted as a psychopathic weapon. You can’t even look at pictures of women with a nice rack and fantasize. Instead, you’re expected to, against your own deep genetic urges, to adulate a fatty. Because that’s the best you’re going to get.

Another current, ongoing example is the situation in Springfield, OH. “Someone” (not quite clear who) has resettled 20,000 Haitian refugees in Springfield, OH, a declining Midwestern industrial town of 60,000. The hue and cry in Springfield in the news mostly surrounds the question whether the immigrants are turning local pets and waterfowl into barbecue. And while the mainstream press, an arm of the elites that has been more than happy to press forward with immiseration of the lower classes, declares such claims false, the reality is that 20K translocated Haitians, in such a modest size community, have no pressure to assimilate. They are also supported heavily by various federal refugee resettlement programs, distorting the local real estate market and availability of public services. And with such a skew, likely are actually governed by gangs.

The two political candidates, as stated above, in the U.S. Presidential election, perfectly exemplify this binning phenomenon. The Democrats are squarely in the elite’s corner, constantly condemning ordinary white people as “Deplorables” and even worse, gate-keeping any potential access to elite ranks through mandatory indoctrination in our colleges and universities. If you don’t subscribe to the belief structures, you don’t get your degree. And if you don’t get your degree, then ostensibly you’re condemned to the underclass you were attempting to escape. Talk about getting your mind right, indeed.

And on the Republican side, you have Donald Trump. Trump is hated perhaps on the surface for his manners and crudity. But the reality of what Trump proposes is a dismantling of the institutional class/caste. Trump as a President was a mediocrity — I can’t think of a single thing he did that was seminal. But by posturing himself against the institutions and threatening to stop the Forever War posture of the U.S. (drop out of NATO, stop sending arms to Ukraine, etc.) he’s attempting to kill two birds with one stone: stop the popular immiseration of the poor by not recruiting their sons to die overseas; and secondly, kill the Wealth Pump for the Military/Industrial/Congressional Complex. All this makes him a threat in both the memetic, as well as the monetary space. And that threat of destabilization of institutions, even though these very institutions are corrupt, creates irrational rage among those in the top 10% of the population that perceive themselves as elite.

And worse. Call it what you will (Trump Derangement Syndrome) but even when you speak against those institutions, you’re going to excite every Flying Monkey in the mainstream press corps that aspires both to be a member of the elite, as well as seeks to promote luxury beliefs in some way to prove their own virtue. This piece was written after the first Harris/Trump debate, which was notable primarily for the fact that the ABC network moderators continually fact-checked Trump while leaving Harris basically alone. Why there are even such a Praetorian Guard associated with a debate, where every larger societal truth is deeply nuanced, is mind-boggling.

I’ve already received feedback from friends and acquaintances who certainly don’t support Donald Trump. Yet when questioned on the basics of Trump’s policies — no Forever War, control of immigration, and stopping various programs of immiseration — they are firmly on that side of the issue-driven debate. Yet they’ll still declare themselves voting for Harris, even though Harris has promised more of the same, while actually delivering on those outcomes as Vice President. Why do people vote against their actual interests, even when issues are broken down clearly? Never doubt the power of the tides of history, or the devolutionary state of a country’s v-Memes. The Matrix rules over all.

How all this ends is fundamentally opaque. Other periods like this, as Turchin notes, ended when the various nobles killed enough of each other off. The problem with any total war where this might occur is obvious — not just mass immiseration of the entire population, but devastation as well. But other, more positive outcomes require elites to rein themselves in. It has happened in the past — Lyndon Johnson’s New Deal was also an example.

At this point, at least to me, it’s looking into a glass darkly. But at least, viewing things through Turchin’s lens, as well as understanding the memetic structure of the argument, the larger meme-scape is framed. Hang on. Let’s see how many folks wake up.