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

by Peter Turchin

In real life, the course of the American Civil War went much as the Osipov-Lanchester model would have predicted. The Confederate Army won most of the battles, thanks to better Southern marksmanship and horsemanship, as well as better-trained officers and generals. But the North mobilized 2.1 million soldiers against 880,000 Southerners. The Union Army still had to endure heavy casualties; it lost 360,000 soldiers against 260,000 Confederates. But after four years of bloody, bitter struggle, the North ground up the South and won the war.[12]

On the darker side, increased well-being has not been evenly shared, and complex societies, both in the past and today, are highly unequal. The Big Question we wanted to answer was: How and why did this “great Holocene transformation” happen?

As data collection needed to answer this particular Big Question wound down, we gradually switched to a new Big Question: Why do complex societies periodically get into trouble? What are the factors explaining recurrent waves of high internal instability, state breakdown, and outright civil war? This question is usually formulated as: Why do complex societies collapse? In the last decade, a whole new scientific discipline, appropriately called collapsology,[14] has arisen to answer this question. To tell the truth, I am not much enamored of this new direction. What’s “collapse,” anyway? As I discuss in chapter 2, which relays what our macroscope sees in the past, outright collapse is only one possible outcome when societies get into trouble. Sometimes civil wars, massacres, and breakdowns of productive infrastructure, accompanied by epidemics, do indeed destroy the fabric of societies, resulting in huge population declines, simplification of governing institutions, and partial loss of knowledge. But some past societies emerged from their crises in a relatively bloodless way by implementing the right set of institutions that addressed the deep structural forces driving them to the edge. And most exits from crisis fall in between these two extremes.

Amateur theorists use two “techniques” to build their grand narratives. The first one is cherry-picking, selecting only historical examples that fit their pet theories. The second one is the Bed of Procrustes, which enables them—stretching a little here, cutting off a bit there—to force various historical examples to conform to fixed cycles postulated by their theories. Ninety-nine percent of “cyclic history” suffers from one or both of these problems. It’s so bad that I tend to avoid the word cycle in my professional articles because it comes with so much negative baggage. (Instead I talk about “oscillations,” “boom-bust dynamics,” etc.)

Organization, if not everything, is one of the most important things you want to know to gauge an interest group’s power.

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).

punished when their polities go down. Motivation by prosocial concerns is one possible reason why a group doesn’t push its narrow interests. Another reason why groups may not act in their interests is because they are swayed by effective propaganda.