Meet Jane. She was born into an affluent family on the Upper East Side. Her father is a senior partner at a corporate law firm in New York, and her mother is a renowned photographer and patron of the arts who serves as a MoMA trustee. They summer in the Hamptons. 

She went to one of the city’s most prestigious private schools (perhaps Trinity or Riverdale). Her common app was solid: excellent grades, a nice assortment of extracurriculars, some charity work (more like voluntourism); and it got her into Columbia.

But, once she got here, she began to feel like she was on the wrong path. Her father wanted her to follow in his footsteps, which would mean four years of college and three years of law school, only to start working 70-hour weeks as a junior associate with unclear prospects of becoming a partner. 

Even the profession seemed wrong: the work her father did for big international companies was either mind-bogglingly boring or occasionally evil, like when he defended a mining company that had poisoned the water supply of Indonesian villagers. On top of that, the prospect of becoming the stay-at-home wife of a wealthy lawyer was equally unappealing to her.

So, she decided to study the history and politics of Latin America. She learns about the United States’ history of imperialism and corporate exploitation, the crushing debt burdens American financiers imposed on the local populations, plus the installation of fascist regimes via state-sponsored coups. She reads about Chavez and Castro and Subcomandante Marcos, and comes to see them more and more as revolutionary role models. 

She learned Spanish and traveled to Guatemala to live with a local family. She saw that they did not have much — a humble home, a repetitive diet of corn, beans, and (infrequently) chicken. But, despite the simplicity of their lives, she saw in them what she never could find back home, not even in the wealthiest echelons of American society — genuine happiness. This experience radically altered Jane’s perspective, and upon her return, she looked upon the world of corporate greed, of frenzied competition and insatiable vanity with a newfound cynicism. 

Jane joined a socialist club and went on strike with the Student Workers Union in 2021. She despises the fascist origins and tendencies of the Columbia administration (did you know that Butler was a big Nazi fan??), stands as an advocate and ally of all oppressed minorities and LGBTQIA+ people, and denounces the peonage of millions enslaved to finance capital. She wants the world to be fair and equal.

She and some friends road tripped out to Minneapolis in June 2021 to protest the murder of Winston Boogie Smith by police. While they were there, a man rammed his SUV into a group of protesters near June and her friends. One person was killed and three were injured. After experiencing this degree of violence first hand (and receiving from her father an anxious plea for her never to attend any such protest again), she decided that the best possible way to effect change and combat violent right-wing extremism was not from the streets (which didn’t seem to accomplish much anyway, and perhaps even made things worse) but from within the system: to have faith in the processes of our democracy. 

Now, she’s a senior and will be applying to her Dad’s alma mater, Yale Law School. She sees her law degree as a springboard to enter the political arena perhaps as a DA. Once there, she could wield real power to advance her vision of removing the authoritarian apparatuses of the state — the police, the prisons — and create a world that maximizes human happiness and is truly equitable for all. 

You may know someone like Jane; maybe you’re even a lot like her. She, of course, is not a real person but an archetype of how even the more establishment-favoring members of the elite strata of society (the Yale law school types) have, through the shifts in elite dynamics over the past decade, become increasingly radicalized.

I must confess, however, that the Jane archetype is not my own (although I slightly modified it) but comes from the recent work by the quantitative historian and self-described cliodynamicist, Peter Turchin, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, which was published by Penguin Random House and has been covered by The Guardian and The New York Times (if those institutional check marks mean anything to you).

The driving force behind End Times and the rest of Turchin’s work is the Structural Demographic Theory (SDT), a method that uses social science and mathematical modeling to explain and predict outbreaks of political instability in complex societies (if Fredrick Malthus or a Malthusian Trap ever came up in your CC or Macro class, it’s a more advanced version of Mathus’ demographic theories). The SDT takes into account variables such as wage levels, social and economic inequality, inflation, incidences of political violence, and indicators of human health (life expectancy, average height) to determine periods of integration and disintegration (secular cycles) in societies throughout history, from the Roman Republic to Capetian France to the United States of America. 

The SDT is composed of two main components. The first, the demographic, is related to population dynamics (births and deaths). In expanding societies where resources are plentiful in proportion to population (either as a result of conquered territory, an ‘open’ frontier, or technological advances) population expands, wages increase relative to inflation and GDP (or their respective equivalents) people live longer, get taller, have more kids, and are happier. In societies approaching or in a period of discord, resources are scarce and growth halts, birth rates fall and demographics contract, wages and quality of life fall relatively and absolutely, life is “nasty, brutish, and short” (who remembers their Hobbes?), people have less kids (often through infanticide [abortion counts]), and the average person becomes quite miserable. 

But these forces do not act on populations as one monolith, and it is naive to say that “the people” have ever historically or do today independently drive these societal dynamics. Pharaohs and kings, knights and shoguns, patricians and dukes, the bourgeois and guildsmen, mandarins and bishops, patricians and nobles, they governed these dynamics in the past, and today, they are governed by congresspeople, judges, heads of bureaucratic agencies, military generals, c-suite executives, heads of media organizations, bankers and financiers, and those with large concentrations of wealth (the Gates/Musk types). All these ruling classes or governing segments (and all the governing appendages of which), past and present, fall under the category of elite, and elite dynamics are what comprise the second component of SDT: the structural. 

Central to the structural component is the concept of “elite overproduction.” The idea is that there are only so many spots in the governing class (there are only 100 senators, 435 representatives, 870 federal judges, etc.) and only so many well-paying lower-tier elite positions that are the arm of the governing class (your senior associates, VPs, and directors at the law firms, consulting agencies, and investment banks). You can imagine one big game of musical chairs with concentric sets of chairs (from the outer least elite and appendicular to the inner most elite and powerful) where all the college kids (aspiring elites) are dancing around until graduation, when the music stops and you’ve gotta snag a chair before someone else does.

During an expansionary period — when markets are opening up, imperialism kicks into high gear, land and people are getting civilized, industry’s growing, the bureaucracy can’t get enough college-educated managerial elites, and the number of chairs increases — if you go to a good school (like Columbia) and work relatively hard you’ve got a good shot of securing one of those chairs and (if you’ve got any brains) working your way towards that inner ring. These are the good times, and the elite class is doing quite well for itself and is content: aspiring elites are converted to established elites who have little baby elites who go to private school and become aspiring elites, etc.

Issues arise in the contractionary corollary — when there are no more lands to civilize, no more markets worth opening, the drone strikes and amphibious assault vehicles have lost their pizazz. The number of chairs flatlines, even decreases, first at the inner level then like a contagion outward, and when the music stops and you get that diploma in your hand and you go looking for a nice chair to sit in, you find there are only a few left and your peer elites are getting quite competitive over it — 5 clubs/organizations, 8-hour superdays, leveraging every 1st 2nd 3rd connection in your network, 70-hour weeks at your first internship, a salary that’s not even worth much when you convert it to an hourly wage, back to school more credentials, masters and professional degrees — and you, unlike Jane, don’t have the connections/credentials/resources to keep up. 

So now you’re looking at all these big shots in their fancy chairs (from the finance bro with a midtown apartment and an Equinox membership to Jeff Bezos with a phallic rocket ship and a $100+ billion net worth) and the only job you could get pays 60 grand a year (which is barely livable in New York and certainly doesn’t allow you to keep up your elite-level spending habits [unless of course you keep siphoning funds from your parents]) and you start to resent all those chair-takers. Maybe now you’re a little more inclined towards a slogan like “eat the rich,” maybe now you start going down deeper and deeper internet rabbit holes about American inequality and corporate greed and the history of exploitation by the capitalist classes, you start going to protests, you’re ready for a revolution.

Meanwhile, there are people who already have themselves some chairs but want better ones, more powerful ones and they’re creating the content you watch and read, funding the politicians that you believe in and thus mobilizing your anger towards their ends. Then, there are the ultra-wealthy and powerful close to the center of this ring of chairs who have their own disgruntled techy/right-wing elites to combat your left-leaning crew, and you think they’re fascists and are going to bring about an end to democracy.

All the while, the non-elite populace has become increasingly immiserated as the elites, too busy fighting among themselves over whatever spoils of empire remain, haven’t found the will to reverse the trends driving inequality, declining health, and general discontent. Governance becomes gridlocked, consensus impossible, and the people, now royally pissed off, are (through media, propaganda, religion or otherwise) pitted against each other by the competing factions of elites. Tensions rise, competition (among elites, among the people, between each other) intensifies, peaceful protests turn violent, and suddenly you have quite a combustible societal situation.

These escalatory elite dynamics — the game of musical chairs — have occurred in history many times before: the end of Republican Rome (130-30 BC), the English Interregnum (1640-60), the Bolshevik Revolution (1905-1922), the United States’ (First) Age of Discord (1860-1920). In his work End Times, Turchin posits that we are currently at one of these historical inflection points in the United States, and have entered a new age of discord. Back in 2010, Turchin predicted the escalating instability of the 2010s, peaking in the tumultuous years around 2020. We saw the validity of these predictions in the contentious 2016 and 2020 elections, during the BLM protests and on January 6th, as well as during COVID (plagues, by the way, are another strong indicator of being in an age of discord). Turchin contends that the demographic and structural prerequisites for discord are already in place, meaning that the crisis phase has already arrived.

Historically, such discordant periods have been times of significant turbulence: social unrest, civil or external war, mass political mobilization, violence, and death. Elite factions in an effort to consolidate their power catastrophize the intentions of their opposers, sowing fear and panic and anger throughout the body politic, which eventually results in those catastrophic imaginations becoming realities. 

We see in our generation, a pervasive anxiety that, I believe, is the psychological manifestation of these feelings of discord. Anxiety over our future prospects, all our student debt, the polarization of our politics, the degradation of our climate, social and economic and racial inequities culminates in this gnawing fear that our conception of what the good life is for ourselves and for society is becoming more of a fantasy than a probable eventuality. Most react by attempting to avoid this existential feeling of dread either through extreme productivity (an almost religious commitment to some career path, obsessive pursuit of fitness goals, overbooked calendars to avoid downtime) and/or consumption (mindless scrolling through digital content, regular drug use [especially psychologically altering drugs], seeking external validation via social media, getting lost in the world of video game), and if you are not able to independently bear the burden of such anxiety you are declared to have “mental illness” and prescribed a will-draining medication and told to meditate. 

Most people view this mental crisis as something separate from our political and societal instability, but we can see how the two are inextricably linked in that structural and demographic drivers of discord lead to individual mental anguish which then fans the flames of the societal discord creating a vicious feedback loop whose only solution, unless cooled, becomes total collective and individual conflagratory catharsis. This is the path we’re on currently, and I think that Turchin and most policy experts are somewhat naive in saying that the simple adoption of a series of reforms to rebalance the social system (similar to that accomplished in the Progressive Era) is, at this point, a realistic option. 

What we need is a change in perspective. Most people (old and young) look at the current set of trends and realities with a great deal of dread, and have become fearful of anyone of an opposing political faction or a member of an immiserated and resentful class. It’s easy, perhaps even natural, to succumb to that fear and angst by trying to drown it out, but the courageous and even optimistic thing to do is to accept the reality of our age of discord and rise to the occasion of addressing it. 

Moments of great societal upheaval are tumultuous but they are also periods of great cultural evolution, times when the actions of great individuals and collectives meaningfully alter the course of history. There is an opportunity for us to let go of the stale and problematic tenets of old ideologies and, instead, create new systems and establish new structures that may benefit not just our generation, but many more to come. Such opportunities do not come along often over the course of history, and we should feel lucky, enlivened, and hopeful that we are alive at a time when such an opportunity exists. 

Certainly, I have been quite arrogant in attempting to psycho-analzye a whole generation, and I will not go so far as to prescribe some correct course for society. What I hope, however, is that rather than succumbing to the paralyzing and life-denying feelings of anxiety and despair, rather than putting each of our heads down in fear and submission to corrupted beliefs and rotten structures, we are able to find a certain boldness, to soberly question all elements of the status quo, to tear down and build up as necessary to create a more just system that may stand the test of time. This way future historians will have something exciting to read about our generation and our times. 

Note: This is the original draft of a to be published piece in the Columbia Independent

Turchin, Peter, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, pg. 1-29, 83-87, 222

Turchin, Peter and Nefedov, Sergey A., Secular Cycles, pg.  3-29

Meet Jane. She was born into an affluent family on the Upper East Side. Her father is a senior partner at a corporate law firm in New York, and her mother is a renowned photographer and patron of the arts who serves as a MoMA trustee. They summer in the Hamptons. 

She went to one of the city’s most prestigious private schools (perhaps Trinity or Riverdale). Her common app was solid: excellent grades, a nice assortment of extracurriculars, some charity work (more like voluntourism); and it got her into Columbia.

But, once she got here, she began to feel like she was on the wrong path. Her father wanted her to follow in his footsteps, which would mean four years of college and three years of law school, only to start working 70-hour weeks as a junior associate with unclear prospects of becoming a partner. 

Even the profession seemed wrong: the work her father did for big international companies was either mind-bogglingly boring or occasionally evil, like when he defended a mining company that had poisoned the water supply of Indonesian villagers. On top of that, the prospect of becoming the stay-at-home wife of a wealthy lawyer was equally unappealing to her.

So, she decided to study the history and politics of Latin America. She learns about the United States’ history of imperialism and corporate exploitation, the crushing debt burdens American financiers imposed on the local populations, plus the installation of fascist regimes via state-sponsored coups. She reads about Chavez and Castro and Subcomandante Marcos, and comes to see them more and more as revolutionary role models. 

She learned Spanish and traveled to Guatemala to live with a local family. She saw that they did not have much — a humble home, a repetitive diet of corn, beans, and (infrequently) chicken. But, despite the simplicity of their lives, she saw in them what she never could find back home, not even in the wealthiest echelons of American society — genuine happiness. This experience radically altered Jane’s perspective, and upon her return, she looked upon the world of corporate greed, of frenzied competition and insatiable vanity with a newfound cynicism. 

Jane joined a socialist club and went on strike with the Student Workers Union in 2021. She despises the fascist origins and tendencies of the Columbia administration (did you know that Butler was a big Nazi fan??), stands as an advocate and ally of all oppressed minorities and LGBTQIA+ people, and denounces the peonage of millions enslaved to finance capital. She wants the world to be fair and equal.

She and some friends road tripped out to Minneapolis in June 2021 to protest the murder of Winston Boogie Smith by police. While they were there, a man rammed his SUV into a group of protesters near June and her friends. One person was killed and three were injured. After experiencing this degree of violence first hand (and receiving from her father an anxious plea for her never to attend any such protest again), she decided that the best possible way to effect change and combat violent right-wing extremism was not from the streets (which didn’t seem to accomplish much anyway, and perhaps even made things worse) but from within the system: to have faith in the processes of our democracy. 

Now, she’s a senior and will be applying to her Dad’s alma mater, Yale Law School. She sees her law degree as a springboard to enter the political arena perhaps as a DA. Once there, she could wield real power to advance her vision of removing the authoritarian apparatuses of the state — the police, the prisons — and create a world that maximizes human happiness and is truly equitable for all. 

You may know someone like Jane; maybe you’re even a lot like her. She, of course, is not a real person but an archetype of how even the more establishment-favoring members of the elite strata of society (the Yale law school types) have, through the shifts in elite dynamics over the past decade, become increasingly radicalized.

I must confess, however, that the Jane archetype is not my own (although I slightly modified it) but comes from the recent work by the quantitative historian and self-described cliodynamicist, Peter Turchin, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, which was published by Penguin Random House and has been covered by The Guardian and The New York Times (if those institutional check marks mean anything to you).

The driving force behind End Times and the rest of Turchin’s work is the Structural Demographic Theory (SDT), a method that uses social science and mathematical modeling to explain and predict outbreaks of political instability in complex societies (if Fredrick Malthus or a Malthusian Trap ever came up in your CC or Macro class, it’s a more advanced version of Mathus’ demographic theories). The SDT takes into account variables such as wage levels, social and economic inequality, inflation, incidences of political violence, and indicators of human health (life expectancy, average height) to determine periods of integration and disintegration (secular cycles) in societies throughout history, from the Roman Republic to Capetian France to the United States of America. 

The SDT is composed of two main components. The first, the demographic, is related to population dynamics (births and deaths). In expanding societies where resources are plentiful in proportion to population (either as a result of conquered territory, an ‘open’ frontier, or technological advances) population expands, wages increase relative to inflation and GDP (or their respective equivalents) people live longer, get taller, have more kids, and are happier. In societies approaching or in a period of discord, resources are scarce and growth halts, birth rates fall and demographics contract, wages and quality of life fall relatively and absolutely, life is “nasty, brutish, and short” (who remembers their Hobbes?), people have less kids (often through infanticide [abortion counts]), and the average person becomes quite miserable. 

But these forces do not act on populations as one monolith, and it is naive to say that “the people” have ever historically or do today independently drive these societal dynamics. Pharaohs and kings, knights and shoguns, patricians and dukes, the bourgeois and guildsmen, mandarins and bishops, patricians and nobles, they governed these dynamics in the past, and today, they are governed by congresspeople, judges, heads of bureaucratic agencies, military generals, c-suite executives, heads of media organizations, bankers and financiers, and those with large concentrations of wealth (the Gates/Musk types). All these ruling classes or governing segments (and all the governing appendages of which), past and present, fall under the category of elite, and elite dynamics are what comprise the second component of SDT: the structural. 

Central to the structural component is the concept of “elite overproduction.” The idea is that there are only so many spots in the governing class (there are only 100 senators, 435 representatives, 870 federal judges, etc.) and only so many well-paying lower-tier elite positions that are the arm of the governing class (your senior associates, VPs, and directors at the law firms, consulting agencies, and investment banks). You can imagine one big game of musical chairs with concentric sets of chairs (from the outer least elite and appendicular to the inner most elite and powerful) where all the college kids (aspiring elites) are dancing around until graduation, when the music stops and you’ve gotta snag a chair before someone else does.

During an expansionary period — when markets are opening up, imperialism kicks into high gear, land and people are getting civilized, industry’s growing, the bureaucracy can’t get enough college-educated managerial elites, and the number of chairs increases — if you go to a good school (like Columbia) and work relatively hard you’ve got a good shot of securing one of those chairs and (if you’ve got any brains) working your way towards that inner ring. These are the good times, and the elite class is doing quite well for itself and is content: aspiring elites are converted to established elites who have little baby elites who go to private school and become aspiring elites, etc.

Issues arise in the contractionary corollary — when there are no more lands to civilize, no more markets worth opening, the drone strikes and amphibious assault vehicles have lost their pizazz. The number of chairs flatlines, even decreases, first at the inner level then like a contagion outward, and when the music stops and you get that diploma in your hand and you go looking for a nice chair to sit in, you find there are only a few left and your peer elites are getting quite competitive over it — 5 clubs/organizations, 8-hour superdays, leveraging every 1st 2nd 3rd connection in your network, 70-hour weeks at your first internship, a salary that’s not even worth much when you convert it to an hourly wage, back to school more credentials, masters and professional degrees — and you, unlike Jane, don’t have the connections/credentials/resources to keep up. 

So now you’re looking at all these big shots in their fancy chairs (from the finance bro with a midtown apartment and an Equinox membership to Jeff Bezos with a phallic rocket ship and a $100+ billion net worth) and the only job you could get pays 60 grand a year (which is barely livable in New York and certainly doesn’t allow you to keep up your elite-level spending habits [unless of course you keep siphoning funds from your parents]) and you start to resent all those chair-takers. Maybe now you’re a little more inclined towards a slogan like “eat the rich,” maybe now you start going down deeper and deeper internet rabbit holes about American inequality and corporate greed and the history of exploitation by the capitalist classes, you start going to protests, you’re ready for a revolution.

Meanwhile, there are people who already have themselves some chairs but want better ones, more powerful ones and they’re creating the content you watch and read, funding the politicians that you believe in and thus mobilizing your anger towards their ends. Then, there are the ultra-wealthy and powerful close to the center of this ring of chairs who have their own disgruntled techy/right-wing elites to combat your left-leaning crew, and you think they’re fascists and are going to bring about an end to democracy.

All the while, the non-elite populace has become increasingly immiserated as the elites, too busy fighting among themselves over whatever spoils of empire remain, haven’t found the will to reverse the trends driving inequality, declining health, and general discontent. Governance becomes gridlocked, consensus impossible, and the people, now royally pissed off, are (through media, propaganda, religion or otherwise) pitted against each other by the competing factions of elites. Tensions rise, competition (among elites, among the people, between each other) intensifies, peaceful protests turn violent, and suddenly you have quite a combustible societal situation.

These escalatory elite dynamics — the game of musical chairs — have occurred in history many times before: the end of Republican Rome (130-30 BC), the English Interregnum (1640-60), the Bolshevik Revolution (1905-1922), the United States’ (First) Age of Discord (1860-1920). In his work End Times, Turchin posits that we are currently at one of these historical inflection points in the United States, and have entered a new age of discord. Back in 2010, Turchin predicted the escalating instability of the 2010s, peaking in the tumultuous years around 2020. We saw the validity of these predictions in the contentious 2016 and 2020 elections, during the BLM protests and on January 6th, as well as during COVID (plagues, by the way, are another strong indicator of being in an age of discord). Turchin contends that the demographic and structural prerequisites for discord are already in place, meaning that the crisis phase has already arrived.

Historically, such discordant periods have been times of significant turbulence: social unrest, civil or external war, mass political mobilization, violence, and death. Elite factions in an effort to consolidate their power catastrophize the intentions of their opposers, sowing fear and panic and anger throughout the body politic, which eventually results in those catastrophic imaginations becoming realities. 

We see in our generation, a pervasive anxiety that, I believe, is the psychological manifestation of these feelings of discord. Anxiety over our future prospects, all our student debt, the polarization of our politics, the degradation of our climate, social and economic and racial inequities culminates in this gnawing fear that our conception of what the good life is for ourselves and for society is becoming more of a fantasy than a probable eventuality. Most react by attempting to avoid this existential feeling of dread either through extreme productivity (an almost religious commitment to some career path, obsessive pursuit of fitness goals, overbooked calendars to avoid downtime) and/or consumption (mindless scrolling through digital content, regular drug use [especially psychologically altering drugs], seeking external validation via social media, getting lost in the world of video game), and if you are not able to independently bear the burden of such anxiety you are declared to have “mental illness” and prescribed a will-draining medication and told to meditate. 

Most people view this mental crisis as something separate from our political and societal instability, but we can see how the two are inextricably linked in that structural and demographic drivers of discord lead to individual mental anguish which then fans the flames of the societal discord creating a vicious feedback loop whose only solution, unless cooled, becomes total collective and individual conflagratory catharsis. This is the path we’re on currently, and I think that Turchin and most policy experts are somewhat naive in saying that the simple adoption of a series of reforms to rebalance the social system (similar to that accomplished in the Progressive Era) is, at this point, a realistic option. 

What we need is a change in perspective. Most people (old and young) look at the current set of trends and realities with a great deal of dread, and have become fearful of anyone of an opposing political faction or a member of an immiserated and resentful class. It’s easy, perhaps even natural, to succumb to that fear and angst by trying to drown it out, but the courageous and even optimistic thing to do is to accept the reality of our age of discord and rise to the occasion of addressing it. 

Moments of great societal upheaval are tumultuous but they are also periods of great cultural evolution, times when the actions of great individuals and collectives meaningfully alter the course of history. There is an opportunity for us to let go of the stale and problematic tenets of old ideologies and, instead, create new systems and establish new structures that may benefit not just our generation, but many more to come. Such opportunities do not come along often over the course of history, and we should feel lucky, enlivened, and hopeful that we are alive at a time when such an opportunity exists. 

Certainly, I have been quite arrogant in attempting to psycho-analzye a whole generation, and I will not go so far as to prescribe some correct course for society. What I hope, however, is that rather than succumbing to the paralyzing and life-denying feelings of anxiety and despair, rather than putting each of our heads down in fear and submission to corrupted beliefs and rotten structures, we are able to find a certain boldness, to soberly question all elements of the status quo, to tear down and build up as necessary to create a more just system that may stand the test of time. This way future historians will have something exciting to read about our generation and our times. 

Note: This is the original draft of a to be published piece in the Columbia Independent

Turchin, Peter, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, pg. 1-29, 83-87, 222

Turchin, Peter and Nefedov, Sergey A., Secular Cycles, pg.  3-29