Well put Lazaros. I thought it was worth sharing with this community, but can't capture all that is there in only about 1,000 words. I recommend people read it for themselves, or listen to the interview he did with Nate Hagens.
In addition to cyclical reality, where there is a pattern to the collapse of prior civilizations, evolution is going on. Where our bodies are stable, how we think keeps delivering more equality. As we have hit the wall of how we do things, understanding we are one humanity and needing to operate like a family could see this civilization succeed. That being so, best we turn our attention to the wake-up that could save us.
But I think he ignores a dimension that is totally orthogonal to the things he studies.
Human civilization and human numbers and technology have all grown due to the one-time gift of fossil sunlight — a gift we have squandered, a gift that will soon rapidly go away.
Indeed, many who lived through the late 1970s and early 1980s have seen this before, back when there weren't so many elites.
Whether the rapidly approaching energy crunch or the over-production of elites is to blame, one can only assume that, if each has any credibility, we have a worst-case situation brewing.
What Turchin calls a “wealth pump” I call a failure of society to hold our institutions of agency and authority for making social chocies for society accountable for authenticity and integrity in their institutional exercises of their institutional authority/power true to their institutional agency/purpose/mission.
The overproduction of elites is a consequence of the underproduction of institutional accountability by the people.
This underproduction of accountability is a consequence of the collapse of common sense, and of a shared understanding of the institutional architecture of the institutions that society supports for making social chocies socially that must be made for all, socially and cannot be made for each of us, individually.
These are the choices of social norms and social narratives that are curated through Ciivl Society institutions for the organization of inquiry and the curation of knowledge.
They are the choices of technology and enterprise that configure the economy, that are made, predistributively, through institutions of Finance.
They are choices of technology solutions to the everyday problems of everyday people living our own best lives, under the circumstances then prevailing, everyday , through institutions of Enterprise and Exchange that we call the Economy.
They are choices for spending the public fisc and exercising public force "in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” (Preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America) that are made through the institutions of Politics and Government for the making and enforcing of the law both individual and institutional choice, action and accountability for the consequences of our choices and our actions.
Today, our common sense is deficient. And we are being derelict.
We do not have a complete and correct inventory of our institutions of Civil Society, Finance, Enterprise and Politics. So we do not have a complete and correct sense of the architectural integrity of those institutions. So we do not have a standard of design against which we can measure their performance, in order to identify institutional deviations from institutional integrity, and ratify those deviations.
Worse yet, we do not even know that this is something we do not know.
The work of moving beyond our own impending End Times begins by getting to know that we do not know what our institutions are, and how they are supposed to work, according to their design of agency and authority for accountability, but that we need to.
Very interesting book. Funnily enough, I saw it for the first time just yesterday at the local library, and spent some time reading it. To me, the important thing is that he tries to challenge the idea that history and societies are “too complex and chaotic” and thus hard to predict anything — I could not agree more with Peter.
Well put Lazaros. I thought it was worth sharing with this community, but can't capture all that is there in only about 1,000 words. I recommend people read it for themselves, or listen to the interview he did with Nate Hagens.
Currently reading this book and it’s one of these works that opens your eyes and you cannot see the world the same way ever again.
Great book. The podcast episode he did with Nate Hagens was really good too.
In addition to cyclical reality, where there is a pattern to the collapse of prior civilizations, evolution is going on. Where our bodies are stable, how we think keeps delivering more equality. As we have hit the wall of how we do things, understanding we are one humanity and needing to operate like a family could see this civilization succeed. That being so, best we turn our attention to the wake-up that could save us.
I don't *disagree* with Turchin.
But I think he ignores a dimension that is totally orthogonal to the things he studies.
Human civilization and human numbers and technology have all grown due to the one-time gift of fossil sunlight — a gift we have squandered, a gift that will soon rapidly go away.
Indeed, many who lived through the late 1970s and early 1980s have seen this before, back when there weren't so many elites.
Whether the rapidly approaching energy crunch or the over-production of elites is to blame, one can only assume that, if each has any credibility, we have a worst-case situation brewing.
What Turchin calls a “wealth pump” I call a failure of society to hold our institutions of agency and authority for making social chocies for society accountable for authenticity and integrity in their institutional exercises of their institutional authority/power true to their institutional agency/purpose/mission.
The overproduction of elites is a consequence of the underproduction of institutional accountability by the people.
This underproduction of accountability is a consequence of the collapse of common sense, and of a shared understanding of the institutional architecture of the institutions that society supports for making social chocies socially that must be made for all, socially and cannot be made for each of us, individually.
These are the choices of social norms and social narratives that are curated through Ciivl Society institutions for the organization of inquiry and the curation of knowledge.
They are the choices of technology and enterprise that configure the economy, that are made, predistributively, through institutions of Finance.
They are choices of technology solutions to the everyday problems of everyday people living our own best lives, under the circumstances then prevailing, everyday , through institutions of Enterprise and Exchange that we call the Economy.
They are choices for spending the public fisc and exercising public force "in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” (Preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America) that are made through the institutions of Politics and Government for the making and enforcing of the law both individual and institutional choice, action and accountability for the consequences of our choices and our actions.
Today, our common sense is deficient. And we are being derelict.
We do not have a complete and correct inventory of our institutions of Civil Society, Finance, Enterprise and Politics. So we do not have a complete and correct sense of the architectural integrity of those institutions. So we do not have a standard of design against which we can measure their performance, in order to identify institutional deviations from institutional integrity, and ratify those deviations.
Worse yet, we do not even know that this is something we do not know.
The work of moving beyond our own impending End Times begins by getting to know that we do not know what our institutions are, and how they are supposed to work, according to their design of agency and authority for accountability, but that we need to.
Very interesting book. Funnily enough, I saw it for the first time just yesterday at the local library, and spent some time reading it. To me, the important thing is that he tries to challenge the idea that history and societies are “too complex and chaotic” and thus hard to predict anything — I could not agree more with Peter.