What Are Our Chances, Doc?

Crisis statistics for the End Times

I know the feeling, calculating cat.

I loathed statistics in university. But I still love statistics—as long as they’re interesting. So the final chapter of Peter Turchin’s End Times was an extra treat. All the fun without any of the bore—if you can call epidemics, civil wars, and state collapse fun, that is.

Over the years, the number of crisis periods studied by Turchin and his team has grown impressively. From Jack Goldstone’s original study of the General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century and the Age of Revolutions, then Turchin and Sergey Nefedov’s study of eight cycles in the histories of England, France, Russia, and Rome, CrisisDB has expanded that number up to around 200 case studies, soon to be 300.

Turchin has even put out a call for any academics interested in joining the fun. As he writes in his latest preprint:

This chapter offers a road-map for researchers to take up this call and extend the body of SDT [structural-demographic theory] cases. The pay-off of these efforts will be two-fold: firstly, these studies can provide novel insight into periods of social strife for any number of cases that require further understanding; secondly, and more impactfully, compiling these cases will allow us and others to refine the theory and add new analytical techniques. The overall goal of all these efforts is to employ SDT on all current societies, identify “trouble spots” and reveal possible interventions that may be able to head off trouble before it starts, or at least to mitigate the severity of crises that do strike. This is work that we, along with our colleagues at the Seshat Databank, will be engaging in for the foreseeable future. We hope that others will join us. We are always eager to collaborate or consult in any such efforts.

I’m not qualified, but if any of my readers are, get in contact with Turchin! It sounds like a great project, and a worthy one.

But in the interests of that overall goal he mentions, let’s take a look at those aforementioned stats. Just what are our chances as we make our way through the Terrible Twenties? It might help to know what we might be facing. After all, the way out is through.

Crisis Outcomes

Based on the CrisisDB team’s analysis of around 100 cases, here’s how things tend to turn out as societies exit their crisis phases:¹

• 50% of crises result in population loss (let’s call it “excess deaths”)

• 30% have a major epidemic (i.e. 60% of the cases above, making it the most common cause of population decline)

• 66% result in massive downward mobility for elites

• 17% see elite groups targeted for extermination

• 40% see rulers assassinated

• 75% end in revolutions or civil war

• 20% prompt recurrent civil wars lasting 100+ years

• 60% lead to total state collapse—either through self-disintegration or foreign conquest

Note that these percentages add up to way more than 100%. That’s because the Horsemen travel in packs, and disasters love company. “For example, Valois France experienced nine out of twelve severe consequences … in the sixteenth century” (p. 224).

The good news: around 10-15% manage to avoid the worst outcomes, but only on the condition that the ruling elites come to their senses. Turchin provides two examples in the book: England during the Chartist Period (1819-1867) and Russia during the Reform Period (1855-1881)—though in Alexander II’s case, he and the Russian ruling elite only managed to forestall the inevitable for about a single generation. Another example covered in the paper Turchin uses for this section is Republican Rome’s Conflict of the Orders (494-287 BCE), ending in the Hortensian law which gave the plebeian assemblies institutionalized legislative authority, thus temporarily staving off the crisis, which came to a head in the 1st century BC. Here’s how Hoyer et al. summarized what these cases suggest in the paper. Free market fundamentalists, prepare yourselves:

It appears incumbent on those with the greatest access to power, wealth, and authority to ‘future think’ and recognize the signs of unrest early on. Crucially, elites must be willing to give up some private gains for the public good, for example through supporting welfare programs or promoting redistribution of wealth and labour autonomy to the working classes. In other words, elites need to change their discount factor to privilege stability and high societal well-being in the future over maximizing immediate status and wealth regardless of the impacts on other groups (Levi 1988). Giving up some privileges in the short term seems to pay-off in the longer term, as the greater stability and high general well- being achieved in societies that can effectively flatten the curves of unrest will provide greater overall returns compared to societies that dissolve in the face of popular unrest and civil war. Further work on an expanded dataset to diagnose the plight of societies entering into, exiting from, or even avoiding crises altogether can help test these hypotheses and, we believe, point the way to policy-relevant insights to help navigate the slate of crises currently facing nations around the world today.

Crisis mitigation is rare because the only way out is to reverse elite overproduction, and there are only two ways to do so: loss of wealth and social status, or death.

Most elites faced with those odds choose the Dumb and Dumber option: “So you’re tellin’ me there’s a chance!”

Unfortunately for them, no, the center really can’t hold. And the center, as Turchin reminds us, “is the policies favored by the ruling class” (p. 211).

Incidentally, Turchin’s non-partisan analysis of American politics is a breath of fresh Eurasian air. (He was born and raised in the Soviet Union, but has lived and worked in the States since he was about 20.) Like Tocqueville, he has the clarity of an outsider looking in at the follies of our politics and the detachment of a naturalist, so he’s not afraid to call out the nonsense he sees on both sides. Maybe “both sides” isn’t the best phrase, however, since as he points out, the U.S. is a plutocracy, and when it comes down to it, intra-elite differences tend to be cosmetic. The bottom 90% of the population has zero effect on legislation. Zero. (See pp. 129-130.)

Turchin argues that there is no possibility in the U.S. of a revolutionary party akin to the Bolsheviks or Mao’s communist party. Revolution won’t come from below. But the influence of liberal and conservative dissidents is asymmetric. “Leftist” figures like Bernie Sanders and Noam Chomsky are simply ignored: “left-wing populists within the [Democratic] party ceased to have any influence on Democratic politics” (p. 211).

But since Trump, right-wing dissidents are increasingly taking over the Republican party from within—the party that used to be the vehicle of the 1%: “today, as I write this book, the Republicans are making a transition to becoming a true revolutionary party” (p. 211). This is where we see the dissident counter-elites making their moves (e.g. Trump, Bannon, J.D. Vance, Tucker Carlson). And it’s why the current ruling elites hate “MAGA” so much: it’s an existential threat to their power.

The Democratic party, by contrast, has now become the vehicle of the 10% (the credentialed elite) and the more exclusive 1% (the economic elite). What Turchin doesn’t much focus on is how the cultural issues that have come to define the “left” (race, ethnicity, LGBTQ+, intersectionality) actually did so. He points out that the Democrats ceased being the party of the workers by the 1990s during Clinton, but doesn’t trace the ideological capture of the party by radical Woke ideology.

If the Republican party is in the process of becoming a revolutionary party, I would argue that the Democratic party has already experienced its own ideological revolution from within. Central to this is the so-called long march through the institutions which Chris Rufo will detail in his upcoming book America’s Cultural Revolution. As for what gives it its particularly … unique flavor, well, that should be obvious to my readers by now. It’s psychopathology.

Whether it’s the psychopathy of leftwing authoritarianism, the Cluster B of trans, or the potpourri of histrionic fetishizing criminality that goes into the making of a Sam Brinton (or this guy), leftist ideology has become a hotbed of psychological dysfunction. Not only that—you can’t even talk about, no matter how obvious it is. Never will you hear any public figure in any position of authority say anything remotely close to the following: “Ok, listen, we love our trans folks, but we really have to be better about weeding out the psychopaths, pedophiles, and middle-aged men who get aroused by pretending they’re women.” That would require something resembling standards, which are inherently discriminatory against … psychopaths, pedophiles, and middle-aged pervs who get aroused by pretending they’re women.

But hey, that’s the first criterion of ponerogenesis (i.e. “see no evil”). And like the options mentioned above for elite overproduction (death or destitution), admitting that your core ideology has a psychopathology problem is inherently self-defeating. It is much better to simply ignore reality, double down, and focus on the short-term gains completely oblivious to the consequences of your psychological blindness. To admit the problem would be to eliminate the problem. And the problem and the ideology are one and the same.

Which leads me to propose a couple research questions for future ponerologists:

• Is the ponerization of the ruling class correlated with pre-crisis periods? I’d guess it is probably fairly common, perhaps overwhelmingly so.

• What percent of crisis exits result in pathocracy (as in the USSR and Mao’s China)? Here, I’d guess less common in the past, more common in the last century or so.

What Is to Be Done?

Very generally, the collective worldview (especially among the elites) which needs to be adopted to mitigate the above outcomes is one of broad-based cooperation vs. the narrow, short-term egoism that produces the wealth pump.

I don’t know the best policies to reverse the self-destructive trend. Perhaps Lobaczewski’s logocracy will help in this regard. But whatever they turn out to be, here are some of the problem areas:

• Too many people are going to college and chasing credentials. Most of those currently going to college would do better going to a vocational school or apprenticing at a trade (or simply getting a higher education for the fun of it, if that were still possible). However, that is currently not feasible, because…

• The richest are making too much money, and the majority aren’t making enough. As long as this trend continues, elite aspirants will continue to compete for degrees, and continue to be disappointed.

• Poor health is a sign of popular immiseration. We need something like this, and more.

• Mass immigration is a destabilizing factor, to say the least, in more ways than one. It needs to stop.

• In a party system, the working class needs political representation. When it doesn’t have this, the wealth pump is free to operate.

• “[D]emocracies are particularly vulnerable to being subverted by plutocrats” (p. 238). Why not a “system better than democracy”?

Take a look at the variables that go into Turchin’s type of analysis here, on pages 16 and 17 of the pdf. There you’ll find such categories as instability events (e.g. riots, lynchings, terrorism); economic, biological, demographic, and social/psychological indicators of immiseration/well-being (wages, life expectancy, height, suicide, marriage stats); elite composition and mobility; and state legitimacy and fiscal strength (budget deficits, ruler popularity).

In a logocracy, all of these things would be monitored in real-time, with each institution factoring them into their planning and actions. For instance, the wise council would track primarily the social/psychological indicators and factor them into their public addresses and counsel to the head of state, senate, and government. The head of state and education council could track elite overproduction in university admissions. And the logocratic association would ensure policy issues take all these indicators and trends into account.

Utopian anarchists may not like it, but every polity above a certain size (i.e. all nations today) has a ruling class and a bureaucracy. There’s a certain “doomer” mentality according to which all ruling elites are as bad as all others—which is to say, the worst—always and everywhere. That’s not true. Some are less bad than others. That may not seem like much, to some. But it’s something. With this in mind, here is how Turchin ends his book:

Cumulative cultural evolution equipped us with remarkable technologies, including social technologies—institutions—that enable our societies to deliver an unprecedentedly high—and broadly based—quality of life. Yes, this capacity is often not fully realized—there is great variation between different states in providing well-being for their citizens. But in the longer term, such variation is necessary for continuing cultural evolution. If societies don’t experiment in trying for better social arrangements, evolution will stop. Even more importantly, when selfish ruling classes run their societies into the ground, it is good to have alternatives—success stories. And it falls to us, “the 99 percent,” to demand that our rulers act in ways that advance our common interests. Complex human societies need elites—rulers, administrators, thought leaders—to function well. We don’t want to get rid of them; the trick is to constrain them to act for the benefit of all. (pp. 240-241)

History at least shows that this is a live option for us. Elites have mostly failed in the past (and present), but in a minority of cases they have stumbled onto something resembling a better path. Maybe we can do even better?

1. Percentages are rough. For example if he says, “nearly two thirds”, I just called that 66%. Read the book for the precise details.