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

by Peter Turchin

Let’s now talk about what I mean by “interest.” The approach I follow is quite materialistic. It assumes that humans want to increase their well-being. Put simply (nearly) everybody prefers to have more money. Thus, workers favor higher wages, while employers prefer to pay lower wages. This is a good start, but we humans are complicated creatures, and there is a lot of heterogeneity among us in our values and preferences. Some people place a higher value on leisure and others on money. Some are motivated by purely material concerns, while others give more weight to intangibles like fairness and cooperation. People can also act against their material interests because they misunderstand them, or are misled by manipulative others. Asking people about their interests by, for example, sociological polls does not always work, because responders often lie about their motivations (sometimes even to themselves). The mind of another is an enigma wrapped in darkness (at least until we learn how to read minds).