End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration

by Peter Turchin

In order for stability to return, elite overproduction somehow needs to be taken care of—historically and typically by eliminating the surplus elites through massacre, imprisonment, emigration, or forced or voluntary downward social mobility.

geopolitical pressures, can generally be neglected, for parsimony, in our cliodynamic models for historical megaempires and the most powerful contemporary states, such as the United States and China.

It is ironic that the organizational vacuum on the far right is so extreme that this far-right terrorist group had to be organized by the FBI.

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.