Elites, Counter-elites, & Manifestos of the Neon Wilderness

Hey... how ya been? Thanks for tapping into Q3 with me. As a reminder, prior editions (this is #14) can all be found HERE, so feel free to slide into the archives. Ok, off we go (and as per usual, but with this one in particular, I recommend a wine or whisky to accompany the waltz).

The moment I thought I was finally ready to put a bow on this one and ship (2 months and 4.5k words in), Oliver (or I guess his name is Chris Lunsford) Anthony, had to pop off with Rich Men North of Richmond, a song with signals just a bit too salient. If you haven't already, invest the 3 minutes and you’ll realize why it has captivated the masses and become the cross-isle anthem of our times.

Ok, assuming Oliver didn't already put you in the right headspace, I wanted to offer what one could consider the antithesis to a soulful Appalachian hymn—a ChatGPT mashup of Ginsberg’s Howl and the UNABOMer Manifesto… it’s heavy, but stick with me. This is what generative AI does really well (oh, and did you know “UNABOM” was FBI code for UNiversity and Airline BOMber? News to me.)

Amidst the neon wilderness of society's rush, I saw the brightest minds of my generation ensnared by a relentless march of progress. 

Their thoughts consumed by the digital hum, seeking solace in the flickering screens of synthetic connections, Restless souls, once wild and untamed, now adrift in the currents of artificial desires.

His voice echoed, a prophet of the shadows, warning of the machine's embrace, A world drenched in cold logic, where the individual dissolves into a collective sea.

The manifesto's somber echoes whispering of a simpler existence, a retreat from the noise, to reclaim an identity buried beneath the avalanche of convenience.

Howl for a dawn where humanity reclaims its essence, breaking the chains of virtual enslavement, in the heart of the wild, the spirit rekindles, learning from the primal wisdom of ages past, Forging a path that weaves technology and humanity with threads of reverence; a symphony of rebellion and evolution, a new manifesto for a world reborn.

In case you missed it through the digital circus that passes for civic discourse these days, Ted Kaczynski (yes, that one) went the way of Epstien recently... ruled suicide, June 10, 2023. In riddance or remembrance, everyone should check out this recent film for a deeper dive into the mystifying menace that was Ted K. Be careful not to misread how much we have to learn from the misfits. 

Soon after, a writer for the Babylon Bee (basically The Onion for alt-right Christians) tweeted the opening to his Manifesto: "The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race." And right in rhythm, Elon replied: "He might not be wrong." Which, in this era of existential AI hype, heat waves, and hyperinflation, is quite an admission from perhaps the most egotistical and industrious industrialist in history.

Thirty-some years ago when the Unabomber's infamous manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future was made public, the condemnation came swiftly and crossed all aisles. Even far-leaning lefties and others sympathetic to the general cause denounced his murderous methods in no uncertain terms. There were better ways to make your point Ted.

But in the last few years, his sentiment—that our democratic, techno-capitalist game has become so rigged that more violent interruptions are necessary—has been spreading. See the recent rage about the film, How To Blow Up a Pipeline that "re-centered" Gaia sabotage and sparked alarmed responses by the FBI and other intelligence agencies... and let's not forget the 2019 novel, Overstory, featuring a gang of five environmentalists driven to eco-sabotage, arson, and accidental murder...that won the Pulitzer btw!

And of course KS Robinson's bestselling "cli-fi" novel, Ministry for the Future, which imagines a post-Paris-Agreement, black-ops, UN-sponsored department that secretly coordinates with the Children of Kali, an India-based eco-terrorist group. One could argue that this book single-handedly caused more change in behavior than all of the COP summits and blockchain carbon credit schemes (really Adam, Flow.life?) combined. In fact, the book had such an impact on powerful people, politicians, and policy-makers that Robinson was invited to keynote the last COP summit... yes, seriously! 

If we're relying on fiction writers whose best solution to our current crises is a shadowy gang of super-assassins, we may be in much deeper trouble than most of us are willing to admit.

But the eco-crisis, as perilous as it might be, isn't what I want to address. I'm struck by a deeper substructure lying underneath Ted's ascendance that connects all other crises to which we're currently and collectively attending. Because let's not forget, before he fucked off to his shack in the woods, Ted K. was a Harvard prodigy and UC Berkeley maths professor. Again... yes, seriously! 

Don't let the mug shots fool you. He was about as far from a meth-head hillbilly or Michigan militia neo-nazi as you could get. A thoughtful Ivy Leaguer; a pedigree many, if not most, would aspire to and gladly wish upon their offspring.

So what's the deeper structure underlying our (and perhaps his) undoing?

For me it's simple... the overproduction of ELITES. In all his madness, Ted was kinda onto something. And that simple dynamic is threatening to undo democracy, society, and even civilization, as it did Ted. Not in due time...right now...in front of our complicit faces. Welcome to Q3 2023! 

If you, like me, have run out of true-crime podcasts and spy thrillers for your summertime beach reading, I recommend Peter Turchin's cheery page-turner, End Times: Elites, Counter-elites and the Path of Political Disintegration. Turchin, formerly an entomologist (a path I was once on as a 20-something, bug-curious outdoorsman in Durango, CO), is one of the founders of a fascinating new field called Cliodynamics, which basically means analyzing history using giant data sets rather than grand theories. I've grown fond.

Turchin rose to fame in 2010 when a rather reputable science journal Nature asked an interdisciplinary set of experts to predict what would happen in the next decade. His answer? A spike in political instability, with a non-zero chance of civil war by the 2020s. Needless to say...post-Brexit, post-Charlottesville, post-BLM, post-Jan 6th, post-presidential-perp walks, etc. etc., Turchin has been on a steady rise towards the most undesirable type of fame. He and Timothy Snyder (who I had the privilege of hearing speak in Salzburg a month ago) seem to be cut from the same (un)fortunate cloth. 

Turchin's lab tracks half a dozen or so key markers of social decline across thousands of years of recorded history searching for the deep patterns that connect them. And from all of that data, two things come up again and again as the clearest canaries in the coal mine (and I imagine AI will only reinforce the findings)—suffering of peasants; overproduction of elites. Clear as day.

And of these two, Turchin emphasizes that, "too many nobles and not enough thrones" is the core driver of great historical unravelings. Because let's face it: pitchforks and torches are rarely as destabilizing as propaganda, plot-twists, and palace coups.

Revolution is almost always an inside job y'all. Yevgeny Prigozhin ring a bell? His recent "accident" is another signal that can't (and shouldn't) be ignored. 

Just look at the archetypal example that has kept politicians and historians up at night for ages—the mighty fall of Rome. You know, barbarians at the gate and all. The Vandals, Goths and Visigoths, wearing animal skins and horned helmets, seem to have both entered our capitol and toppled the Roman world.

Except, I'm not sure that's how it all went down (or at least as sure as I am about Prigozhin's death being an accident).  

Alaric I, the chief architect of one of the more decisive sacks of Rome in 410 AD wasn't just a barbarian, he was a decorated general in the Roman army, and responsible for defending the empire against all sorts of threats from the European heathens—unsettling as we look at the Putin/Prigozhin parallels in Q3 '23.

It was only after his troops got decimated, losing over 10,000 men, that he became disillusioned with the emperor's promises. He realized then he was never going to get the aristocratic promotions, fancy villas, and political respect he felt he had coming to him, so he [insert Putin] marched on Rome [insert Ukraine] and tore the whole damn thing down. 

When you get too many elites to keep them all fat and happy, you initiate a cycle of wars, rebellions, and defections—the creation of the "counter-elites" of Turchin's subtitle.

So while Kaczynski was a nerdy outsider in the Harvard Yard, he took an elite perspective and resentment into the woods with him. Ironically, it was his insistence that his Manifesto be published by those very same elite institutions he'd rejected—the Times or WashPo—that turned out to be his undoing… seriously, it’s worth watching. In fact, it was his brother who spotted his idiosyncratic phrasing and punctuation and turned him in. (Larry Fink, the editor of Penthouse offered to publish it, but Ted rejected the offer as too low-brow and carried on journaling in the woods and losing his damn mind). 

So with Teddy K. as the backdrop, take an honest look at where we are now with the accelerationist, anti-democratic, Christian, neo-fascist takeover in the west, and you realize that the fingerprints of elite overproduction are as abundant as they've ever been (and to be clear, I mean that technically and descriptively, not pejoratively). In fact, there's a decent chance YOU are unknowingly all-in on their project and hoping it comes to fruition! 

Steve "let's tear the whole thing down" Bannon is a great example of such an accelerationist looking to speed up the collapse of our current system rather than lean into love and amend it from within.

"Anti-democratic" seems a fair description of jigsaw puzzle gerrymandering, quasi-Jim Crow voting restrictions, and ploys to subvert the popular vote with state-appointed electoral voters. As many MAGA politicos have been pointing out since Jan. 6th, "the USA is a republic, not a democracy!" The goal isn't to win over voters, it's to limit who can vote to those who are most likely to vote in their favor. Best of luck to "outsider candidates" like Vivek Ramaswamy running on rationality and 1776 ideals.

The notion of a "Christian neo-fascist", simply reflects the quiet but getting louder sub-narrative that the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene (and some Supreme Court justices) are addicted to:

“America has been and always should be a unified-Church-and-State Christian nation.”  
"Christian morality should be reflected 1:1 in American legality." Seems like Sharia law for Jesus peeps to me. Some are fearing these movements, and others are cheering them on. Either way, they are unfolding as (predictably) expected.

So let's take a closer look at the key players on the MAGA "burn it down" bus.  The results are as fascinating as they are frightening. 

• Steve Bannon: Harvard/Goldman Sachs

• Ron DeSantis: Yale/Harvard Law

• Ted Cruz: Princeton/Harvard Law

• Josh Hawley: Stanford/Yale Law

• DonaldJT: did he even go to school? I forget

• J.D. Vance–: Yale Law/Thiel Capital

Add on the anti-establishment Democrat and political scion RFK Jr. with a Harvard undergrad and London School of Economics/UVA Law degree, and we've got ourselves a full elite sweep (and it's worth noting that Fidel Castro was a lawyer...as was Robespierre and Vladimir Lenin). Did we learn our lesson? If you really want political stability, ironically, you should really cut out all the lawyers.

And yet, somehow, despite their pedigrees, all of these American politicians have positioned themselves as vox populi!

It's only after they got within sight of the last few rungs of the aspirational ladder that they looked to separate themselves from the edifice they'd been supported by and climbing. As my man Greg Graffin notes, sometimes truth is indeed stranger than fiction (I had a period in my teens that many would consider an addiction to Bad Religion). 

But let's not kid ourselves...

Sure, all those MAGA-elites got into the Ivies, but none of them (except maybe RFK Jr.) got invited into the Skull and Bones secret societies like the Bushes, or the swanky clubs and dinners at Princeton or Harvard.

Like Maleficent, privy to the palace, but not invited to Sleeping Beauty's baptism, they cursed the kingdom and then vowed to ensure its undoing.

And if elite overproduction seems like a weird term in need of defining, I’d say you’re overthinking it. In the 1960's only about 15% of the US population had undergraduate degrees, while today, it’s nearly 70%. It’s that simple, and we’re all likely part of that latterstat (it really does work as a single word.. help me out y'all). 

And while it’s true that being a "college grad" is little more than a box to check, millions have been sold (and enrolled) in the education=success story their whole lives, only to get to the end of law/med/biz school, often with six-figure debt, and realize that LLMs, Legal Zoom, and insidious insurance schemes have reduced them to little more than blue collar cogs in an incomprehensible, elite machine.

In this era of tech titans, marketing millionaires, and high stakes crypto bros, it’s the doctors, lawyers, and college professors (professions that used to reflect the top of social respectability) who are embarrassingly middle class.

And add to that overproduction of elites what Turchin calls the "Wealth Pump" (where owners get to extract more profits out of the system than can ever possibly trickle down to the workers) and you have “heightening immiseration”…aka existential poverty (George Carlin is needed now more than ever). Not to mention a citizenry increasingly suggestive to the critiques of the counter-elites.

In our current world of union busting by even the so-called "progressive" companies (see Tesla's, Whole Foods', Amazon's, Starbucks', and of course Hollywood’s recent efforts to shut down organized workers) and massively widening wealth gaps, the wealth pump has been shunting all kinds of extreme profits to the 1%.

We're suffering more financial inequality today than we did on the cusp of the Great Depression! So yeah, the average prole is understandably pissed off and being quite literally amused to death (as in Postman, not Waters).

But sadly, for all of this demographic analysis, Turchin's solution to elite overproduction and the inevitable creation of the counter-elites is far from reassuring. 

Sorry, in almost all historical instances, you have to kill them off.  

War. State Collapse. Insurrection. Epidemics. The guillotine and a Robespierrian reign of terror is often what it takes. Stalin did it... Mao too. Pol Pot's hit-list was first and foremost all of Cambodia's intelligentsia. It became a virtual death sentence to be caught wearing reading glasses!

Out of thousands of data sets, Turchin’s lab could only find a few outliers of the entrenched elites realizing what's happening and reversing the wealth pump just enough to forestall violent revolution. The Glorious Revolution in England and FDRs New Deal in the 1930s come to mind (that continued through LBJs Great Society moves in the 60s). 

Or, consider 20th century USA. Coming out of WWII, the effective tax rate on the top income brackets had climbed to over 90%! Today, as Warren Buffet has admitted, nearly every 1%er pays lower effective taxes on their income than their secretaries. This is not an assumption, this is a fact. Back then, billionaires kept only $10 of every Benjamin they pocketed. Imagine that! With the GI Bill funneling more veterans into university and graduate schools, the whole Keynesian pump-priming project was in full swing all the way through the 60s.

Wealth was more evenly distributed back then that at any time in American history, and it set the stage for the most prosperous decades of the Pax Americana. That is, until Reagan broke the stagflation of the Carter years with a return to bare-knuckles market-driven ideology. Clinton cannily realized that this center might actually hold, and ditched the blue-collar, union-driven Left (sorry Joe) in favor of the NAFTA multinational. 

Bushes was gonna Bush...no surprises there. But in this brave new world, the Clintons candidly collect astronomical speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, and even Obama wasn't dumb (or brave enough) to upset that sweet deal. The wealth pump had reversed and was siphoning prosperity upwards...and it hasn’t stopped since.

Fun Fact #1: Obama was to the right of Reagan on tax policy (and to the right of George W. on extrajudicial drone warfare).

So the 2008-2016 Fox News drumbeat about him being a "socialist" was an utterly transparent dog whistle to old white folks that, if you had your Cracker Barrel decoder ring, translated to, "he's gonna take all your shit and give it to brown folks!" Instead, it should have read, “he’s gonna continue to let the hedge funds and multinationals take all your shit via the relentless forces of late-stage-capitalism.”

But we (I?) digress...

So what are the odds that the vanishingly small and increasingly concentrated elites running the show these days will be willing to reverse the wealth pump and turn trickle-down economics into an actual waterfall of shared prosperity... perhaps even a  regenerative (queue the shameless self-promotion) Learning Economy?

For those lacking optimism that the last thirty years of increasingly neo-liberal ratcheting is going to reverse anytime soon, here's Turchin's, cliodynamics-driven prediction on how these things usually go.

Generation One: civil or international war, revolutions, violence.
Generation Two: uneasy peace, with the horrors of the last conflicts still front of mind.
Generation Three: subsequent outbreaks of war by the bratty grandkids who don't remember the destruction of the last lap.

It's a slightly less heartening version of the old "shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations" quip about intergenerational wealth creation and destruction. Or the crypto-enforced meme of, Hard Times Create Strong Men, Strong Men Create Good Times, Good Times Create Weak Men, Weak Men Create Hard Times. And around and around we go.

For the United States, if we do nothing proactive to reverse the wealth pump and actively redistribute more of the spoils, Turchin predicts the 2020s will get increasingly violent and unstable.. and in all its irony, it seems Elon would agree. 

That's the argument in brief about where we're heading, and what we're looking at in the run-up to the 2024 elections. So as you scan the memes and messaging in the upcoming campaigns (or take a second look at migration and passport options... as I have), keep an eye out for the Ivy degrees and bullshit resumes behind the populist rhetoric and see if what we're witnessing doesn't map fairly well to Turchin's (or perhaps even Kaczynski's) analysis. 

Also ponder if, in this rampantly neoliberal, free-market age, where even progressives barely mention income and other wealth taxes, whether maybe, just maybe, we should get inspired to equitably share the love (be it currency, property, or dignity) before folks come and take it with hate. 

After all, this isn't personal, or even political. It's just historical.

Still here? Thank you...and I'm impressed. 

Let's speedrun three more fun facts for the cocktail party (provided you, like me, hang out with nerds over 40 with uncommonly intact attention spans).

Fun Fact #2: apparently, monogamy really is more stable as societal bedrock than polygamy. So despite their retro-reasoning, focus on the family... turns out Jordan Peterson wasn't wrong. That's because monogamous elites tend to produce fewer next-gen elites to duke it out for the throne. Kinda makes sense right? Polygamous empires like the Muslims and Mongols, as Turchin has validated, have too many concubines in their harems, and experience twice the volatility of Christendom.

It takes them only a century to whipsaw through all of the stages of violent upheaval, while monogamous empires typically take two hundred years. In other words, slow your roll and settle on quality over quantity. 

Fun Fact #3: Ukraine is a way more interesting story of elite-overproduction and subsequent instability than almost any of Western news coverage would suggest. Spend more time traveling, and listening to those connected to reality, as opposed to blind faith in the modern media apparatus.

If you're torn between draping a yellow and blue flag over your "In this house we believe science is real" lawn sign, or going down the rabbit hole with Russel Brand and RFK Jr. believing that Putin was justifiably responding to NATOs relentless plans of expansion.

Or fixated on Hunter Biden's laptop.
Or stanning Zelensky as a selfless hero.

And then giving up trusting anything to go back to making sexy selfies on Midjourney as the world unravels from any knowable truths whatsoever...

Then you'll be pleased to know that, in fact, Ukraine is a corrupt nightmare of a feudal oligarch state, divided between two major factions: one on the east with strong affinity to Russia, and one on the west with European aspirations. In fact, before the Soviet Union fell, Ukraine had a higher GDP per capita than either the motherland of Russia or its Belarusian neighbor. By 2014, its GDP had plunged to $7500 per person per year while Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Russia each had incomes around $20,000.  

The 2014 Euromaidan Revolution (Revolution of Dignity) that was heralded by mainstream western press as a triumph of democracy was actually just a shuffling at the trough between two feuding oligarch clans. The people got shafted both ways, while the U.S State department quietly pumped $5B into handpicking politicos for positions that favored Western trade and big-biz banking agreements.

Even Zelensky, the understandable darling of the Western press since the war broke out, was initially chosen as a puppet to stand in between the former president and the rival clan. And let me be clear, much like democracy is the worst form of government...except all the others, I think Zelensky is among the worst form of elitism...except all the others. 

Since the invasion, he's refashioned himself as a war-time president, and might just be able to thread the needle and carry that credibility into a remarkable reworking of power politics.

Or (alternatively) he may get shoved aside, as overreaching Yanukovych was before him in 2014 when the oligarchs in control of all national media flipped the switch on public support and tossed him out on his ear (parallels to the Koch/Murdoch conservative axis vs. the Trump family are also clear). Remember that pitchforks and torches are rarely as potent as propaganda and palace coups.

Point being... real life is messy and complex and rarely submits to the tidy soundbites on Fox or MSNBC (or the Telegraph or Economist for that matter). 

But elite overproduction, and the wealth pump pushing profits up the food chain to the oligarchs at the top? That's just Cliodynamics.

Which brings us nicely to our fourth and final fun fact...

Fun Fact #4: Cyclical histories are almost always full of shit.

I know, I know, during those sketchy days of lockdown, you might have geeked out on The Fourth Turning (that one that Bannon is in love with). It just explains so much about where we are these days! Or perhaps you've been tracking an Evangelical, End-Times calculator counting down the days to the rapture. Or even a New-Age, Hopi Prophecy/Kali Yuga/Mayan Calendar Dream Catcher. I come from a hippie upbringing... I really do get it. 

Or the fact that Pi repeats every three hundred years or so. Or is it every three decades? My tarot cards always offer conflicting theories on this one. 

But the reality is that they're all off the mark (even the really good ones, like Pulitzer winning Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s, Cycles of American History + Cyclical Theory). And it's not that there aren't patterns in history. There are. I fully subscribe to what was attributed to Twain here: "history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Here's where Turchin really won my heart though: In one paragraph, he neatly eviscerates all that fuzzy logic and motivated reasoning.

Read it, and forever be the wiser!

"While historian narratives can be deeply informative, the work of amateur armchair theorists is generally useless. These authors are typically not historians and they often know very little history. Ignorance is liberating, but not enough. 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 "cyclical history" suffers from one or both of these problems."

Why does this critique of cyclical histories matter and resonate...at least for me? Because it lays the foundation for conspiratorial, apocalyptic, Teddy K-style thinking! On top of everything—things have been getting super weird lately. From the collapse in authority, to global systemic crises, to tangled mythologies—it’s increasingly difficult to tell what’s around the bend. 

The seductive pull of wild rapturous ideologies (and the cyclical histories that often justify them) beckon.

The more uncomfortable and the less certain we are, the more tempting it becomes to reach for comfort in community. And what's the most tempting community to latch onto? The one that confidently proclaims to know exactly what’s going on behind the curtain and is certain it’s going to be safely perched on the right side of history when shit starts to unravel. End-time ideologies are like a giant ontological vacuum, devouring everything in their path. It's that slow sucking sound as you watch friends and family slip down the conspiratorial rabbit hole (we are ALL too familiar on the other side of Trump and Covid).

Or maybe less rabbit hole, and more black hole as all of our end-times-end-games blend together at the event horizon. And sorry to say, I think we should expect conditions to worsen on the road ahead. As plagues, fires, famine, and floods (to say nothing of global cabals secretly running the world, or imminent alien disclosure) ricochet around us, it’s hard not to read into things.

Signs and portents abound. Heavenly omens in abundance.

Meanwhile the echo chamber of social media is taking our shadows and turning them into demons. By the clicking of our thumbs, something wicked this way comes. Go ahead and reserve your criticism for my disinterest in tapping into (un)reality.

So as we bid Ted Kaczinksi adieu, we can revisit his thesis that "The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race" with some fresh eyes and perspective. And while we're likely to continue assessing the pros and cons of the Industrial Revolution for decades to come, the longer, even deeper truth is staring us in the face: Elite overproduction and its clear and present consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

Whether we learn from the past and move to mitigate the mishaps this time around remains to be seen, but what I won't say is that we didn't see it coming.

Ok, on to the good stuff...

Taykentots I'm currently snacking on:

• Reads: The Consilience Project + The Weave + Read Something Wonderful

• TrueFacts: Fish that Suck (Ze Frank—iykyk)

• PopStar: Kendal Gentry & Friends (Congrats Pops... love ya!)

I love hearing back and always reply, so don't hesitate.