Carolina QuotesImmiseration is important, but... societies can... be pretty stable with quite a lot of immiseration. As long as the elites are united and the state is strong, the state can suppress all those peasant rebellions... All "successful" revolutions and civil wars were the result of the intraelite conflicts. Even today, if you look at Donald Trump, who is sort of the main "revolutionary" so to speak, ...he is not particularly immiserated himself, but he's channeling... the tens of millions of immiserated Americans.
Peter Turchin Connected to the Carolinas
Source
45:10
- work
- Human environment across time (2023)
- year
- 2023
Cite this record
“Immiseration is important, but... societies can... be pretty…” Peter Turchin. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-1B96F8BB11. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/1b96f8bb11
More from Peter Turchin
The SDT is not merely a theory for understanding why internal violence outbreaks develop and spike. By providing... understanding of the deep structural causes of socio-political instability and societal breakdown, SDT... gives us tools for adopting... reforms and policy interventions that can reverse these drivers of instability.
...[A]s a result ...the new elites, let's call them the elite aspirants... their numbers... begin to be so large that there is not enough power positions in... politics or in economics [e.g., corporations]... That's fixed, and as the numbers of elite aspirants vying for these positions increase, then first... the result... is intraelite competition, and secondly... the numbers of frustrated elite aspirants who are denied access to these positions begins to explode.
All these cycles look set to peak in the years around 2020.