People, ideas, machines XII: Theories of regime change and civil war

Preference falsification and Britain's slide to chaos...

I would rather discover one cause than be king of Persia.

Democritus

At such a time the life of the city was all in disorder, and human nature, which is always ready to transgress the laws, having now trampled them under foot, delighted to show that her passions were ungovernable, that she was stronger than justice, and the enemy of everything above her. If malignity had not exercised a fatal power, how could anyone have preferred revenge to piety and gain to innocence? But when men are retaliating upon others, they are reckless of the future and do not hesitate to annul those common laws of humanity to which every individual trusts for his own hope of deliverance should he ever be overtaken by calamity; they forget that in their own hour of need they will look for them in vain.

Thucydides, Book III, 82-84

​​Great crises constitute the weather that favours Prussia’s growth, provided that it is fearlessly, perhaps even ruthlessly, exploited by us… There is no exact science of politics just as there is none for political economy. Only professors are able to package the sum of the changing needs of cultural man into scientific laws… Politics is neither arithmetic nor mathematics. To be sure, one has to reckon with given and unknown factors, but there are no rules and formulas with which to sum up the results in advance.

Bismarck

[T]he democratisation of Europe is at the same time an involuntary arrangement for the breeding of tyrants.

Nieztsche

A single spark can start a prairie fire.

Mao, paraphrasing an ancient text

It is not always when things are going from bad to worse that revolutions break out. On the contrary, it oftener happens that when a people which has put up with an oppressive rule over a long period without protest suddenly finds the government relaxing its pressure, it takes up arms against it. Thus the social order overthrown by a revolution is almost always better than the one immediately preceding it, and experience teaches us that, generally speaking, the most perilous moment for a bad government is one when it seeks to mend its ways.

Only consummate statecraft can enable a King to save his throne when after a long spell of oppressive rule he sets to improving the lot of his subjects. Patiently endured so long as it seemed beyond redress, a grievance comes to appear intolerable once the possibility of removing it crosses men’s minds. For the mere fact that certain abuses have been remedied draws attention to the others and they now appear more galling; people may suffer less, but their sensibility is exacerbated.’

In all periods, even in the Middle Ages, there have been leaders of revolt who, with a view to effecting certain changes in the established order, appealed to the universal laws governing all communities, and championed the natural rights of man against the State. But none of these ventures was successful; the firebrand which set all Europe ablaze in the eighteenth century had been easily extinguished in the fifteenth. For doctrines of this kind to lead to revolutions, certain changes must already have taken place in the living conditions, customs, and mores of a nation and prepared men’s minds for the reception of new ideas…

[T]hough it took the world by surprise, it [1789] was the inevitable outcome of a long period of gestation, the abrupt and violent conclusion of a process in which six generations played an intermittent part.

Tocqueville

All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control.

Von Neumann

Comprehensively deepening reform is a complex systems engineering problem.

President Xi, 2013.

Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong — these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.

Churchill

Inside the intelligence services, special forces (themselves under attack from the Cabinet Office and NI Office as they operate as our last line of defence, see below), bits of Whitehall, and those most connected to discussions away from Westminster, there is growing, though still tiny, discussion of Britain’s slide into chaos and the potential for serious violence including what would look like racial/ethnic mob/gang violence, though the regime would obviously try to describe it differently. Part of the reason for the incoherent forcefulness against the white rioters last year from a regime that is in deep-surrender-mode against pro-Holocaust marchers, rape gangs and criminals generally, is a mix of a) aesthetic revulsion in SW1 at the Brexit-voting white north and b) incoherent Whitehall terror of widespread white-English mobs turning political and attracting talented political entrepreneurs. They’re already privately quaking about the growth of Muslim networks. The last thing they want to see is emerging networks that see themselves as both political and driven to consider violence. Parts of the system increasingly fear this could spin out of control into their worst nightmare. In No10 meetings with the Met on riots, I saw for myself a) the weird psychological zone of how much order rests not on actual physical forces but perceptions among a few elites about such forces that can very quickly change, and b) how scared the senior police are at the prospect of crucial psychological spells being broken. We can see on the streets that various forces have already realised the regime will not stop them. What if this spreads? Whitehall’s pathology has pushed it to the brink of this psychological barrier and many of them know it.

Aspects of the situation are tragi-comic. E.g if you talk to senior people in places like UAE, they tell you that bigshots in that region now tell each other — don’t send your kids to be educated in Britain, they’ll come back radical Islamist nutjobs! Our regime has spent thirty years a) destroying border control and sane immigration (including the Home Office’s jihad against the highest skilled, whom they truly loathe discussing and try to repel with stupid fees etc) and b) actively prioritising people from the most barbaric places on earth (hence immigration from the tribal areas most responsible for the grooming/rape gangs keeps rising) and c) funding the spread of those barbaric ideas and defending the organisations spreading them with human rights laws designed to stop the return of totalitarianism in Europe. In parallel, they’ve started propaganda operations with the old media to spread the meme that our ‘real danger’ is the ‘far right’ (code for ‘white people’). As Tories and Labour have continued their deranged trajectory, they have provoked exactly the reactions they most feared including the spreading meme that our regime itself has become our enemy and the growing politicisation of white English nationalism.

These deep state discussions about the growing prospect of violence, like the focus group discussions about ‘civil war’, have seeped through to few MPs or hacks. And the evolution of the Cabinet Office in recent years has excluded ministers, spads and the PM from almost any visibility inside the NSS, the National Security Secretariat of the CO, which has acquired power from the rest of the security/intelligence system and runs a failing empire within a failing empire. When I said in 2020 that, among the general changes to the dysfunctional No10/CO system, the oversight of NSS must change so it became visible and legible again to the PM’s office so we could participate in debates like — what are the actual priorities of the intelligence services vis Putin and Xi — some senior officials tried to pretend that zero political scrutiny of NSS was somehow a constitutional principle. After I left, this system became even more closed and dysfunctional, hence the total lack of true strategic thinking connecting ends-ways-means over Ukraine and all things defence procurement becoming more and more Kafka-esque as the MoD shipped stuff to Ukraine. I repeat: the lack of legibility of the NSS is without historical precedent in the UK for centuries and is related to broader issues of Whitehall’s dysfunction, the disgraceful shambles of the MoD etc.

SW1’s OODA loop has operated for years as a massive denial-of-service-attack on its own perceptions of reality — constant cycles of ephemeral emotional hysteria and Narrative Whiplash while No10 has no capability to execute priorities. A great recent example: Professor Ansell saying that the Zelensky Oval Office interview meant that Farage’s prospects had ‘peaked’ (widely Bluesky’d approvingly!) — an emotional spasm entirely in tune with SW1’s NPC network reflecting OODA-as-DOS-attack. This has, as I’ve argued for years, made it more and more vulnerable to history’s remorseless pattern: slow rot, elite blindness, fast crisis, sudden collapse.

The old parties lost their last chance to fix things in a sort-of normal way when the Trolley and his girlfriend told everyone in 2021 they were going ‘back to normal politics’. SW1 cheered including the Tory MPs who got culled en masse in 2024. Sunak doubled down on optimising for *pats on the head from Permanent Secretaries and lawyers*. After Starmer won, SW1’s NPCs tweeted to each other how they now had ‘serious grownups’ and we’d return to ‘normal government’.

But this was just another cycle of delusional SW1 Narrative Whiplash. The Starmer project blew up on contact with the reality of Whitehall. Now both parties are led by Dead Players. Both old parties are structurally knackered. And the NPCs tweeting ‘hurrah for the grownups, Sue Gray is the Jedi we need’ a few months ago are now Bluesky-ing ‘disgusting rhetoric from Starmer’.

Starmer is speed-running Sunak’s demented combination of a) massively raising the salience of immigration/boats with b) a set of policies that everyone who understands the details knows cannot possibly do what he’s promising.

Why is he doing it? Because, like Sunak, he’s caught between a) political advice that the country is enraged over immigration/boats and wants action, b) the adamantine priority of the dominant faction in Whitehall — i.e the force that actually orients 99% of policy — is maintaining 1) the HRA/ECHR-judicial review system and 2) the cross-party HMT/OBR/university-endorsed immigration/asylum Ponzi. Being a Dead Player optimised to ‘defend the institutions’ at all costs however pathological, Starmer has, aping Sunak, synthesised the political advice of McSweeney and the priority of the officials/lawyers actually running No10/70WH and generated his own version of Sunak’s demented combination.

If you’re not in the meetings, you can’t accurately estimate the relative levels of dishonesty and self-delusion involved. Obviously there are officials and lawyers in the meetings who understand reality and are happy to feed ministerial delusions, as they did with Cameron, May, Boris and Sunak. And there are odd unusual officials who could bluntly tell the truth: PM, so there is no confusion, what you’re announcing cannot possible do what you claim. I know Sunak was super-delusional, not lying, only because I spoke to him in person twice. And of course many politicians develop weird super-position personalities, where they sort-of-know and sort-of-lie to themselves such than an impartial observer can rarely conclude either ‘they’re lying’ or ‘they’re deluded’: it’s a bit of both. It’s how many cope when promoted to jobs far beyond them. And it’s very poorly understood among business elites who always overrate the rationality of political players and underrate the prevalence of this super-position-personality phenomenon which means widespread avoidance of the real issues in meeting after meeting to an extent the median business elite has little experience of outside companies heading for bankruptcy. I suspect there’s more conscious dishonesty with Starmer than Sunak but the result is sure to be the same: political disaster.

I repeat what I predicted about Sunak when in 2023 the old media regurgitated endless nonsense on how No10 plans could stop the boats without dealing with the HRA and judicial review because [hand wave]. The BBC, ITV and SKY have repeated the process with Starmer’s announcements: no explanation, ever, of how and why the HRA works. Just as when Jenrick correctly said that the HRA means that UK SF is droning people instead of arresting them — which I revealed on this blog in 2021 but everyone ignored — the old media span the story as ‘Jenrick accuses SF of murder!’ When the actual story was that the lawyers were instructing it was LAWFUL, the opposite of murder, to drone but NOT lawful to arrest and this was the actual mad story — but the HRA angle had to be distorted then buried. (And NB. this droning-not-arrest driven by ECHR+CO lawyers+Kafka continues.) And the old media did not explain after Rudakubana attacked the prison guards that Britain does not keep even convicted terrorist killers about to be released from jail who are believed to be plotting a new attack under surveillance because legal advice is it is unlawful under the HRA — so a fortiori, Rudakubana can’t be kept under proper surveillance. And there are many hundreds of similar or worse absurdities. Terrorists literally being hunted from cave to cave in Afghanistan by JSOC (US classified special forces) have used satellite phones to procure London barristers to bring legal cases against the MoD for ‘human rights’ abuses and won secret payouts of millions while on the run. Such grotesque cases are classified by the Cabinet Office to stop MPs knowing what the ECHR actually does and close to zero MPs are informed of such lunatic dynamics. (Hence my advice to Sunak to declassify the ECHR/HRA effects on security, take them out of red STRAP files and publish them.)

I went through the boats in great detail in 2020 with both a) the military and b) the best lawyers inside and outside government and the conclusion was absolutely clear: operationally stopping the boats is very simple and could be done in days but CO legal advice endorsed by external experts is that the PM cannot do this simple thing lawfully because the courts will stop him using the HRA/ECHR. (In simple terms if the PM tried to order the Navy to stop the boats in a serious way, the courts would state that the PM’s orders are unlawful under the HRA therefore the Navy cannot execute them and the Cabinet Secretary would tell the PM that he cannot insist on his orders being obeyed as, in extremis, both the PM and officers could be arrested for contempt. The core operational and political problem of ‘stop the boats’ could be solved by simple primary legislation explicitly whacking the HRA though the broader issue of the Strasbourg court and other international law angles requires deeper action. I won’t go into the details of this here.)

You therefore must choose between (A) our priority is the HRA/ECHR over stopping boats, or (B) our priority is stopping the boats therefore the HRA regime (plus some other legal barriers) must be changed in primary legislation. Sunak chose A. So has Starmer. But both have spun the media that the choice does not exist and are pretending they’ve prioritised immigration. And if you rely on BBC or ITV or SKY you will not realise the choice exists because the broadcasters reflect the priority of officials: keep the voters in the dark on the subject.

I told Sunak he was deluding himself and his plans could not work. He said he understood ‘the complex details’ better than me or anybody else. His argument shifted over time to ever more baroque contortions ending in the inevitable humiliating failure — baffling given his intellect unless you grasp the problem of the super-position personality politicians develop to avoid facing reality, and the rarity of people around PMs who will tell them bluntly ‘you are deluding yourself PM’. Starmer will fail just the same whether he’s lying or deluded or in a superposition.

And ironically this farce is generating not a ‘return to normal government’ but the resurrection of SW1’s hate figure, Farage, to champion what voters said in 2016, 2019 and 2024: we hate Westminster and we demand huge changes. Farage hasn’t built a campaign machine and professional team on any scale. Reform remains essentially Farage + iPhone. But he plays a consistent main character in the show while the rest of the cast are writing their roles out of the script. McLuhan said that if it’s on TV it’s a TV show — and we can modify this to if it’s on social media it’s a social media show. The old parties do not understand social media shows. (As I wrote a few months ago, Marshal McLuhan warned that the emergence of new media always generates dynamics that are effectively invisible to almost everybody but a few artists. The old political-media elites now publicly perform Narrative Whiplash via new electronic media but are almost totally unaware of their performance — they memory-hole everything including their own performances. Cf. discussion of this here.)

And on the politics, I repeat again a central argument SW1 en masse cannot absorb but which is crucial to grapple with when considering what comes after the collapse of Labour and Tories…

The Vote Leave strategy for turning the Tories into an essentially new party with a new electoral coalition was much, much more logical and easier to maintain given the big historical forces in play than it is for Labour to cope with the same cultural and electoral dynamics such as educational polarisation and the rapidly changing media.

Starmer has a truly nightmare situation because the issue of what to do about immigration is no longer susceptible to post-1991 SW1 politics-as-usual. Rich graduate London, crucial for what Labour has become, has radicalised itself (like the Democrats) such that it is on principle hostile to border control and treats arguments made by Bill Clinton and Obama as ‘racism’. But keeping them happy enrages most of the country outside London. And Starmer has done a Sunak and enraged everybody! Rich graduate London now rages at Starmer for his ‘appalling rhetoric’ and not-London hates him because it knows his rhetoric is just more lies and delusions and nonsense we’ve seen from SW1 for 25 years and everybody can see the boats keep coming on video every day proving we’re right. He’s said the trajectory has caused ‘incalculable damage’ yet he self-evidently does not even believe his own words given his trivial proposals — a perfect Sunak recipe for infuriating everyone and destroying your electoral coalition. Starmer’s rhetoric, like Sunak’s, could only work politically if you deliver and he’s already made clear delivery is not his priority, the ECHR is.

It was much easier and more logical for Sunak to prioritise voters, ditch the ECHR and actually stop the boats while Starmer sided with Jolyon and the human rights lawyers. Yes they’d have lost Osborne, Grieve et al. Good, more winning! It is much, much harder for Starmer to do the same because most of his MPs and activists and a good chunk of his voters in cities are with Grieve and Jolyon.

The VL strategy was easier to execute given the actual facts of electoral dynamics. But immediately after the 2019 election SW1 ran its denial-of-service-attack against itself and convinced itself that, like in 2016, our victory was a fluke because of ‘extreme circumstances’, ‘Corbyn’ etc and it would be ‘madness’ for the Tories to try to maintain that ‘incoherent’ electoral coalition because it would ‘pull the Party towards extremism’ (i.e doing what most voters want). They then cheered Boris-Truss-Sunak as they machine-gunned the entire coalition with the biggest wave of uncontrolled immigration ever, tax rises, vandalism on a vast scale, then declared ‘see the 2019 coalition could never have lasted’!

Why? Because the last thing any part of SW1 (outside some of the deep state) wanted to see was the Tories transformed into a different party that was super-tough on crime and immigration, super-focused on productivity and science-technology-startups-investment, super-disruptive of Whitehall’s core institutions, and supported by a national coalition uniting parts of the working classes and middle classes. Super-popular outside SW1 but a nightmare for SW1.

So both parties cheered by the NPCs have doubled down on a trajectory that is deeply unpopular to almost every constituency — the ‘mainstream’ has alienated everybody except Whitehall and some other London/university characters desperate to prop up the rotten edifice. They’ve revived their bogeyman, Farage. Sunak and Starmer are the last of the old party leaders who’ve clung to the dead scripts of the hollow SW1 simulacrum — hollow ‘leaders’ optimising for *pats on the head from Permanent Secretaries and government lawyers* even when it leads to their own implosion.

While the new government imploded, the Tory Party could not benefit. It has disintegrated in all areas. Its membership has either defected to Reform or retreated in disgust from politics, its donors have gone on strike, its local networks have collapsed, it cannot generate good ideas, it cannot campaign and communicate (its communication is so self-sabotaging they disintegrate faster when they try harder), and networks on which it depended for people and ideas have either themselves died or defected. In the recent elections, councillors got Thanos’d and if Kemi is still there in a year most of what’s left in England, Wales and Scotland will get Thanos’d. Now the party is just a hundred English MPs and a few thousand councillors rattling around in a hollow historical institution. Next May it won’t even be that.

The questions remain:

• What if anything does Farage build and who does he recruit in the next few months? Does he want to find people to be Chancellor etc who are better than the old parties? Can he exploit the surging energy for new politics among the young, can he hoist a sail and let that force blow him along to greater victories over his enemies? Or does he blow the chance and let that energy be captured by others?

• Do the Tories bin Kemi this year and try to save themselves or leave her and watch the rest of their party get Thanos’d next May? And if a new team takes over this year can they even reverse the slide — or has the Party already crossed the invisible event horizon into oblivion?

• What do Labour MPs do when they realise their PM has done a Sunak and machine-gunned both London-Remain and non-London-Leave?

• How do parts of Whitehall prepare to sabotage Farage, copying their friends in Europe who routinely sabotage political threats to the old system?

• How do other parts of Whitehall, particularly in security and intelligence, respond to the disintegration?

• How do voters respond to the meltdown of the old system and creeping chaos?

• What new crises accelerate collapse? I said in 2021 — prepare for the grid to collapse and infrastructure everyone relies on to stop working. These trends will continue. The immigration Ponzi is blowing up. The Ponzi scheme of the modern financial system could blow any time.

• How fast do violence and no-go areas spread? Do we start seeing networks emerge combining explicit anti-Islam, explicit violence/sabotage, and competent organisation, as the deep state fears?

I think there will be another SW1 spasm and Kemi will get the heave-ho this year. After this, the social media show changes to either a) the Tories are sunk and closing down and sorting into Labour/LibDem or Reform, or b) ohmygoodness there’s a last gasp at revival, how will Starmer and Farage, neither of which have political machines worth the name, cope?

I explored these dynamics in detail a few months ago HERE.

I explored the general phenomenon of OODA-as-DOS-attack and Narrative Whiplash here.

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This blog will look at three books on regime change.

Peter Turchin’s End Times.

Barbara Walter’s How Civil Wars Start.

Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies.

They explore fundamental questions of history and politics:

• What are the patterns in history versus ‘just one damn thing after another’? What patterns can we see in repeated episodes of disintegration and regime change?

• How to ruling elites maintain power?

• Why does their grip on power sometimes collapse?

• What is the relationship between material forces (e.g spreading urbanisation), ideas (e.g socialism), institutions (e.g the Cabinet Office, NATO), technologies (e.g railroads or drones), alliances (e.g the pre-1914 alliances) and individual choices (e.g an assassin)? When looking at regime change, what can we figure out about the balance between Tolstoy’s historical forces and individual decisions?

• Why do some revolts take off while others fizzle out?

• How reliable and useful are predictions? How much is inherently unknowable because crises are by definition chaotic and influenced by odd random people acting secretly, assassination etc?

• What strategies are there to avoid the bloodshed and horror that always accompany collapse?

• How to think about counterfactuals? (Cf. my blog on Bismarck.)

In my 2013 essay and 2014 blogs I explored the history, and possible application to government, of thinking about complex systems with nonlinear interdependencies and emergent properties — also see my blog on ‘systems management’ in ICBMs and Apollo and the need for a sort of ‘systems politics’ (the end of this paper summarises how Whitehall’s management is the opposite of what we know works best).

The subject of ‘complex systems’ emerged from the intersection of biology, economics, the birth of computer science post Gödel-Turing and other subjects after 1945. You can see it in Wiener’s Cybernetics and some of von Neumann’s post-war writing on computers, the brain and self-replicating automata. Out of this emerged things like agent-based models. The Nobel winner Murray Gell-Mann, namer of the quark, wrote a fascinating book about what he called complex adaptive systems I highly recommend, The Quark and the Jaguar. He also helped set up the Santa Fe Institute to develop inter-disciplinary ideas about complex systems. The biologist E.O.Wilson described in Consilience ‘the Ionian Enchantment’ — the belief in the unity of nature, the search for the principles that explain it, the unification of knowledge as the foundation for modern science. Wilson argues that the Ionian attachment provides an ‘Ariadne’s Thread’ of explanation from bio-chemistry to genetics to quantitative models of the brain to culture. (For further reading on the history of maths and computing that preceded the breakthroughs of Turing et al, cf. here. Also cf. Nobel winner Phil Anderson’s More is Different.)

At the same time as the subject emerged in the 1940s, Asimov gave it the most famous fictional treatment in the Foundation series in which mathematicians develop ‘psycho-history’ to predict — then intervene in — the rise and fall of regimes. These ideas have been fascinating to generations and now there are ways to build tools that in limited ways touch on Asimov’s ideas.

Twelve years after writing that essay I believe even more strongly that a sort of systems politics is necessary — a mix of new people, new ideas, new institutions and new training including ideas from the heyday of systems management developed in projects like Apollo.

Applying some of these ideas was central to our success in 2016 and 2019 and to how we started changing how No10 worked in 2020. But I must admit that I have totally failed to persuade Insiders of the need for systems thinking. Even worse, I think that if I polled Insiders, it would reveal that they have persuaded themselves that — to the extremely limited extent to which Insiders have any idea what systems thinking means — I oppose it, even though I’ve published a few hundred thousand words on the subject.

I increasingly feel as if I somehow contributed to making systems politics a sort of anti-meme among Insiders— ‘an idea with self-censoring properties, an idea which, by its intrinsic nature, discourages or prevents people from spreading it’ (cf. this interesting sci-fi story I was alerted to by Anthropic’s Jack Clark). I’m thinking about how to reverse this anti-meme property among Insiders. It won’t come from me writing or talking more since if I’ve helped anti-meme it, I cannot directly reverse it. Something else is needed. (See here for myths and reality on No10.)

Turchin is from this intellectual tradition of complex systems. He is trying to identify patterns in the cycle of integration and disintegration we see in regimes across time and space.

NB. I want to collect statements, speeches, memos etc reflecting elite blindness before the revolt/revolution comes, before 1789, 1848, 1914, 1917, 1933, 1989/91 etc — and examples of the rare person who did see it coming but was ignored.

E.g Frustratingly, in the excellent biography of Metternich I blogged on last year the author writes that one can trace Metternich’s thoughts almost day-by-day in early 1848 as revolution spread across Europe up to his own balcony, but he then skips over them and gives a short summary. I’d love to see the day-by-day account of how Europe’s statesman with the best developed intelligence network for political news, who had seen the historical forces building for years, tracked the spread of revolution up to the moment the crowds outside forced him to flee in disguise.

I am also going to build a dashboard to track data relevant to the spread of chaos and violence in the UK. If you know of relevant data sources please link in comments. E.g arrests at public gatherings has data back to 18th Century.

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I’m giving a speech in Oxford on 11 June — What Is To Be Done? — tickets here… Assume some combination of Kemi and Starmer imploding and some new force emerging: how should it be oriented when it walks into No10?

Special Forces

Three weeks ago the BBC reflected the Cabinet Office campaign against the SAS by airing an attempted hit job. But the most interesting thing about it was the BBC showed video with the SAS squadron having a tally over 6 months of killing a dozen or so while arresting hundreds. The BBC portrayed this as evidence of psychopaths on the rampage. But the truth is, obviously, the opposite — they killed a tiny fraction and arrested the vast majority, the exact opposite of what you’d see if the most famous special forces on earth were actually on a killing spree. So the official Cabinet Office/BBC claim is our most highly trained soldiers were … actually incapable of killing more than a tiny fraction of unarmed often ‘sleeping’ civilians… And this nonsensical drivel was repeated by NPCs. Obviously, the BBC ran this as ‘news’ and the government did its usual bullshit ‘we can’t talk about the inquiry’ while its officials brief the BBC anonymously…

Also it was reported that the MoD is investigating serving soldiers for voicing support for the public campaign to stop lawfare against soldiers. Logical!

As I blogged a month or so ago, this issue is now very live among serving soldiers and is one of those invisible-to-SW1 tidal waves with potential to be a huge crisis — sudden and ‘unforeseen’ in SW1 but obvious long before if you were looking in the right place. This issue is bubbling out of control for Whitehall as serving soldiers start speaking out.

Read this excellent piece by Richard Williams, former commanding officer of SAS, on this subject. As he points out, the Regiment — past and present — are watching carefully who keeps quiet and who speaks out in their defence.

Please spend 60 seconds to click and sign this petition and help force the MPs to debate in Parliament the Cabinet Office’s lawfare against our own Special Forces. Support the SAS and SBS, our last line of defence... And follow this substack for updates on the issue. If you know who the specific officials are driving this in the CO, please let me know, the CO has their lists, I’m starting a list too…

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Previous in this series:

XI: Leo Strauss, modernity and regime change — and an update 20/5: Notes on: On Classical Political Philosophy

X: Freedom's Forge — the story of American business and industrial production in World War II. Incredible contrast between the America of WWII and now viz building things. Highly relevant to current debates on tariffs, supply chains, AI/drones/robotics etc.

IX: IX: A) Britain's 'Organization of Victory' under Pit 1793-1815 and B) Metternich & European Community

VIII: CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton, 'a wilderness of mirrors', covert operations, assassinations, moles & double agents, disinformation. A blog on Angleton and the broader history of the CIA and US elites’ attempts to understand the political world. The long-term failures of the CIA on critical geopolitical issues, their security failures and penetration by the KGB, the fundamental problems of building effective intelligence agencies and integrating their work in an overall institutional structure — these deep problems are all extremely relevant to today as Washington increasingly can align on just one thing, hostility to China. Given this history we should not bet on the Washington deep state outperforming the PRC on intelligence and in many areas it seems the PRC has learned lessons from America’s victory over the Soviet Union better than Washington learned them.

VII: On RV Jones, Scientific Intelligence in World War II, how Whitehall vandalised the successful system immediately after the war. Many issues explored in the RVJ blog are relevant to those subscribers interested in the future of AI, ‘safety’, and security.

VI: Alanbrooke diaries, incredibly relevant to today’s problems and what military ‘strategy’ really is.

V: Colin Gray and defence planning

IV: Notes on The Kill Chain — US procurement horror, new technology, planning for war with PRC.

III: More on fallacies of nuclear thinking / strategy / deterrence. If you read this and the earlier one you’ll see that almost everything the media says about Putin and nuclear threats is wrong / misguided and, worse, so is much of what is said by international relations/historians/military academics.

II: Thinking about nuclear weapons

I: On innovation in militaries, when does it succeed/fail — e.g why US got ahead on aircraft carriers, RAF defence in 1930s.

Prediction: 1) lessons from UKR will overwhelmingly support the arguments of those who in 2020 argued for radical MoD changes (including taking money from old tank projects that everybody privately admitted were a multi-billion pound disaster) and 2) the correct criticism of the review and connected documents will be seen as a) they did not go nearly far enough, b) the collapse of No10 follow through on defence reform in 2021 was — like the collapse of 2020 plans for planning reform, tax cuts, deregulation, Project Speed, intense focus on R&D and skills etc — a disaster for the country (and a political disaster for the Tory Party). [Me, 3/2022]

On rationalism and politics (2022).

And some other related stuff pre-No10…

On high performance government, ‘cognitive technologies’, ‘Seeing Rooms’, UK crisis management (2019)

On AI, nuclear issues, Project Maven (2019

On the ARPA/PARC ‘Dream Machine’, science funding, high performance, and UK national strategy (2018)

On ‘systems engineering’ and ‘systems management’ — ideas from the Apollo programme for a ‘systems politics’ (2017)

On China vs US, the ‘Thucydides trap’ book (2017)

And obviously I think that if you’re thinking through AI and geopolitics you should study, or at least skim for a weekend, my chronology of Bismarck. A month of study and you’ll be in the top 0.01% of people who really understand high performance politics, an incredible shortcut! If you take this path, you will have a great advantage over your competitors.

‘Politics is a job that can really only be compared with navigation in uncharted waters. One has no idea how the weather or the currents will be or what storms one is in for. In politics, there is the added fact that one is largely dependent on the decisions of others, decisions on which one was counting and which then do not materialise; one’s actions are never completely one’s own. And if the friends on whose support one is relying change their minds, which is something that one cannot vouch for, the whole plan miscarries… One’s enemies one can count on – but one’s friends!’

Bismarck

End Times

Turchin traces patterns of integration and disintegration, of stability and crisis, of elite cooperation and elite fragmentation, of state formation and collapse over the past thousand years. All societies go through cycles of peace and harmony periodically hit by internal conflict, chaos, crackup, and re-formation in a new regime.

I summarise it as: slow rot, elite blindness, fast crisis, sudden collapse, regime change.

He coins the term cliodynamics for his approach — from Clio, the Greek muse of history. He uses data and models of complex systems to understand what happened and why. (Technical details in an appendix.)

He applies what he sees to our time and predicts that we are hitting another crisis point including severe violence in the 2020s.

Elites are ‘those who have more social power — the ability to influence other people’. Turchin distinguishes different sorts of elite power:

• political

• hard power (e.g military, intelligence agency)

• financial

• administrative (e.g an official running a large bureaucracy)

• ideological/ideas (academics, media etc)

Powerful individuals in the US security forces are rare. Hoover was a powerful force at the FBI. Generally politicians have kept such people under control since the Civil War.

He identifies five fundamental factors in regime change (he doesn’t use this term much but I will to keep things consistent across this, Strauss etc):

A. Popular immiseration. E.g the stagnation of median real wages recently.

B. Elite overproduction and competition. This happens ‘when the demand for power positions by elite aspirants exceeds their supply’. E.g in America in the 1840s-50s and recently.

C. Financial stress, out of control debts etc.

D. Geopolitical disruption. This is the least consistent — it can be important but not necessary. Toynbee — great empires die by suicide, not murder.

E. Political entrepreneurs exploiting the dynamics, e.g Hong (Taiping), Lincoln, Trump.

All of these are present today.

The pattern of revolutions is:

• Pre-crisis: the regime struggles to maintain control in the face of elite fragmentation and popular anger.

• Crisis: the regime loses legitimacy and new players strive for dominance.

• Post-crisis: the crisis is resolved, a group wins, a new regime forms.

No society in recorded history has an integrative phase lasting more than around 200 years. And collective violence tends to recur ‘with roughly fifty year periodicity’. The timing is related to generations. A generation experiencing bloody civil war has kids who are scarred by the experience. When the memories have gone, it’s more likely to recur. (Interesting that he says about 50 years based on various databases and my handwavy phrase in the blog on regime change was ‘about fifty years’.)

In European history between the Dark Ages and 1789, we can see these phases of integration and disintegration. Population growth 1100-1300, immiseration, elite overproduction, famine, Black Death, crisis, collapse. And these patterns recur with war between England and France adding to the elite competition and wars periodically killed off large numbers of elites, easing competition in the next generation. In England there are episodes such as the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 which frightened elites into lightening the burdens on peasants and the War of the Roses which exhausted elites and saw perhaps a fourfold reduction in their numbers.

• There’s the High Middle Ages followed by the Late Medieval Crisis.

• There’s the Renaissance followed by the General Crisis of the 17th Century.

• There’s the Enlightenment followed by the Age of Revolutions.

In Ancient Egypt and China since 221 BC there’s similar cycles.

A huge difference in Europe is obviously that after the 17th Century England managed to avoid further civil war and revolution while it plagued Europe in cycles. England still suffered tension/crisis in cycles but elites managed to adapt enough to avoid large scale violence. E.g in 1830 revolutions in Europe while in England Lord Grey negotiated the Reform Act and violence was limited.

Elite overproduction is deeply affected by monogamy/polygamy. Muslim countries have faster cycles of chaos because polygamy encourages faster elite overproduction.

Weather and plagues are often the trigger for crises and can synchronise crises across territory. E.g The Great Famine 1315-17 and solar minimum. The Black Death. Cholera in 19th C. Covid.

Contagion synchronises crises across territory. E.g disease hits the poorer harder which spreads elite overproduction. Ideas spread as contagion, e.g spread by telegraph in 1848, by the internet in the Arab Spring.

China and the Taiping Rebellion

200 years ago China’s GDP was the biggest in the world. After 1820 China experienced ‘the century of humiliation’. By 1870 GDP was less than half Europe’s.

There was a constant run of famines, rebellions, and defeats by foreigners.

The Taiping Rebellion (1850-64) was the bloodiest civil war in recorded history:

The Qing dynasty ruling from 1614 was ruled by scholar-bureaucrats promoted in a system of examinations that extended (mostly) to the army. The exams encouraged study of Confucian classics — a common ethos.

Over 90% of the empire were peasants, roughly 9% were artisans, merchants, soldiers etc. And the tiny mandarin class ruled them.

From 1614-~1820 , China grew:

• Better agriculture.

• Some industrialisation.

• Population growth. By 1850 4X the 1600 level.

In the first half of the 19th C, progress went into reverse.

• Land per peasant shrank 3X.

• Real wages down.

• Average heights down.

• Famine 1810 then 1846-9, 50-73, 76-79, 96-97, and 1911.

Elite overproduction:

• Number of power positions relatively constant.

• Number of aspirants grew through Qing dynasty. Growth of merchant class.

Political entrepreneur emerged

Hong Xiuquan (1814-64) became leader of the Tapei rebellion.

He was the third son of a well off family who started failing exams and couldn’t get promoted. He had a nervous breakdown then had religious visions. He combined propaganda from Christian missionaries with his visions to form a new syncretistic religion, the Society of God Worshippers, a major goal of which was to purge China of Confucianism. (He thought of himself as a sort of Christian but western Christians disagreed.)

He began recruiting converts among other alienated elites. It grew slowly. 1847 — 2k supporters having fits and speaking in tongues. They started attacking Buddhist temples and smashing statues. Popularity surged during an 1850 epidemic when word spread that sick people cured themselves by praying to the Taiping God.

In 1851 Hong declared the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom with himself as Heavenly Emperor. People sold possessions and joined up. Attempts to suppress him were violently resisted by locals.

The situation of famine, epidemics, misery undermined the empire and generated recruits. His army grew to half a million by 1853. They conquered Nanjing. He almost brought down the Qing dynasty. Eventually in 1864 Hong died. Nanjing fell.

Over 14 years 30-70M people died.

Turchin points to the similarities between Hong, Lincoln and Trump:

• immiseration

• elite overproduction

• a political entrepreneur defecting from the elite.

America: economic & political cycles of immiseration and elite overproduction

Turchin identifies phases of American elites grabbing more and elites sharing more since Independence:

• After the War of Independence there was an integrative phase. Relative wages are wages divided by GDP per capita. 1780-1830 the relative wage nearly doubled.

• There was a disintegrative phase from roughly the 1820s to 1930 with two spikes of collective violence: the Civil War and ~1920.

• In the 1820s-50s there was a phase of declining relative wages and elite overproduction that propelled Lincoln to the presidency. Relative wages declined by nearly 50% by 1860.

• After the Civil War relative wages were stable until ~1910 after which there was sustained growth until the 1970s. Relative wage nearly doubled 1910-1960.

• In the 1930s FDR and the New Deal was a deliberate use of political power to distribute wealth more widely to avoid a crisis. Unions were given a lot of power for collective bargaining. Rich individuals and companies had to share more of growth than they wanted. Nearly half the millionaires who thrived in the 1920s were wiped out by the Depression. Worker wages grew faster than GDP per capita. The size of the top fortune declined in real terms 1930-1980. (I think Turchin overrates the altruistic side of FDR and underrates the aristocratic politics of FDR — i.e mobilising the demos against his aristocratic opponents, per Pericles and the Alcmaeonidae).

• From the 1970s, a new phase began. Real wages started stagnating. Relative wages started declining and fell ~30% 1976-2016. The gap between rich and poor started rising again.

Lincoln

He was propelled to power by elite overproduction and popular immiseration.

America was ruled by an elite of a) aristocratic slave owning farmers and b) Northeastern patricians — merchants, bankers and lawyers.

New York’s merchants exported southern cotton and imported European manufactured goods.

Southern voters had a greater weight thanks to the 1787 compromise that counted three-fifths of the slave population in apportioning representatives and presidential electors. The South also controlled half the Senate though the North had double the population.

• From the 1820s to 1860 relative wages declined by nearly 50%.

• Average height started shrinking.

• In the five years before the Civil War urban riots spread (38 lethal riots).

• Threats and actual violence between politicians grew including on the floor of Congress.

• New populist parties including the anti-immigration Know-Nothing movement.

• Elite overproduction. The number of millionaires grew from a handful to 100. The number of lawyers grew rapidly.

• The size of the top fortune in 1790 was $1M (Elias Derby); 6M in 1830 (Girard); 20M in 1848 (Astor); 40M in 1868 (Vanderbilt).

The new wealth came from mining, rail and steel. But the newly wealthy were constrained by the political power of the southern aristocracy. They wanted high tariffs to defend their new companies and provide money for infrastructure. The established elite, living off exporting cotton for imports, wanted low tariffs. On many economic and regulatory issues the interests of old and new money diverged.

By the 1850s the party system was fragmenting and four candidates competed in the 1860 election.

I’ve written before how our times resemble the cycle of regime change in 1840s-1850s Europe. You can see similar echoes in 1840s-1850s America.

Reconstruction

After the war the power of the southern aristocracy was shattered.

• A quarter of southern men of military age were killed on the battlefields.

• Holding Confederacy debt was ruinous.

• Emancipation and the 13th Amendment ended slavery and the economic basis of southern agriculture.

Northern capitalists were hugely strengthened.

• Holding Union debt was lucrative.

• Supplying the war effort was lucrative.

• Many titans of business were northerners who avoided military service by buying substitutes.

• 1860-70 the number of millionaires grew from 41 to 545.

• The railroad industry was greatly strengthened.

• Industries were protected by tariffs.

• A national banking system.

• Pacific Railway Acts authorised government bonds and land grants to railway companies.

• Homestead Act enabled surplus labour to claim grab unclaimed land in the West, reduced the supply of labour in the East, which was balanced by the Immigration Act 1864 which increased labour supply and created the Bureau of Labor explicitly to develop ‘a surplus labor force’.

The Republican Party dominated until FDR, with the DEMs winning the Presidency only in 1884, 1892, and 1912.

The Gilded Age of 1870-1900 was chaotic and contentious. The Social Register became more important. The rich sent their kids to expensive boarding schools then Ivy League colleges like the English. Elite social clubs spread. A network of non-profits funded by the rich started arguing over policy.

Elites worried about unrestricted competition and the Great Merger Movement of 1895-1904 created new large companies trying to limit competition. Three men contributed the bulk of cash to new foundations: Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Brookings.

The shift from FDR to Trump

Violence and the Bolshevik Revolution spooked elites 1910-1930. In 1919, 4M participated in strikes. The Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921 was the deadliest labour dispute in American history (it turned into a general insurrection and had to be put down by the army). And there was a Red Scare after 1917, a peak of terrorism, bombing campaigns by Italian anarchists etc.

Immigration Acts in 1921 and 1924 were partly a reaction.

Then FDR dramatically shifted economic policy with collective bargaining, social security, minimum wage etc.

After the New Deal and WWII, there was two generations of broad based improvements for Americans. Inequality reduced. This all started to change in the 1970s.

We have:

• For two generations after the 1930s the real wages of American workers grew. Real wage growth stopped in the 1970s. The median real wage 1976-2016 grew from $17.11 to $18.90 p/hour, just 10%. Americans with advanced degrees went from $33 to $44 p/hour. Americans with just a high school education saw wages decline over forty years from $15.50 to $13.66 p/h. [Lots of other things changed in the 1970s. E.g Nixon announced a goal of energy independence via nuclear energy and created the agency to regulate nuclear energy which then stopped building of nuclear plants. Regulations of all kinds started spreading. NASA lost George Mueller and began a slide into bureaucracy that stopped the plans for a permanent moon base and Mars. The Pentagon consolidated McNamara’s changes to budgeting that have led to fifty years of horror.]

• From 1940s to the 1960s relative wages grew robustly. After the 1960s relative wages fell and by 2010 had nearly halved. (Turchin uses somewhat different numbers at other points. E.g he also says relative wages fell ~30% 1976-2016.) Relative wages have not had a sustained 30 year fall since 1830-60.

• The cost of many crucial things have exploded relative to median wages. E.g A worker earning median wages in 1976 had to work 150 hours to earn one year of college. By 2016 the median wage worker had to work 500 hours to earn one year of college, three times more, and the average person with high school but no degree had to work four times more.

• From the New Deal through the 1960s the minimum wage grew faster than inflation. Since the 1970s inflation has lowered the real minimum wage. Union power weakened from the 1980s.

• Average life expectancy started to decline 2013-16 for the first time since statistics began in 1933.

• The gains in average height since ~1900 stopped with children born in the 1960s. (Though the gains continued in Germany, Norway and others.)

• ‘Deaths of despair’ (suicide, drink, drugs) started rising. They spiked among non-graduates after 2000.

• The number of Americans in ‘extreme distress’ rose from 3.6% to 6.4% 1993-2019. Among the white working class this went from <5% to 11%.

• Extra wealth flowed mostly to elites. Today taxes on companies and billionaires are at their lowest since the 1920s. (TRUE??) Starting in the 1980s the number of super-rich (>10M) grew ten-fold from 60k in 1983 to 700k by 2019. The number of millionaires grew four-fold.

• Elite overproduction.

• Exploding public debt.

• Family, church, parent-teacher associations, and all sorts of voluntary organisations declined over the past 50 years.

• Spreading geopolitical chaos.

After 1991:

• The supply of labour rose with immigration and more women working.

• Lots of jobs moved offshore from America and Europe.

• Spread of automation.

Elite overproduction now

There are too many graduates chasing too few elite jobs.

• Early 1950s <15% went to college.

• By 1966, 30%.

• 1960-70 number of doctorates more than tripled.

• For a short period, connected with defence spending and Sputnik etc, the number of senior positions also grew. But then it stabilised while the number of degrees and doctorates kept rising.

• The number of lawyers has also risen. And the distribution of wages has shifted since ~2000 from a single peak to a bimodal distribution: there’s a bunch of relatively low paid, some very highly paid, and little between (below, there are some salaries above 240k excluded). Consider that half law graduates leave with debts of 160k or more, 1/4 over 200k, and you cannot escape paying this except by death or renouncing citizenship and leaving (bankruptcy has no effect).

• Callahan has reported the spread of cheating throughout professions, business, sport, journalism, exams etc.

• There is also the well publicised story of how the top 10% have increasingly turned schools into an arms race for credentials.

Elite fragmentation and polarisation

A nearly universal feature of pre-crisis is ideological fragmentation and polarisation among elites. Divisive movements tend to spread in crisis, e.g sectarian and identity.

Elite fragmentation and competition has contributed to declining public trust in political institutions and unravelling of social norms governing core institutions.

Turchin considers studies of individual Congress members since 1800 and concludes:

• A period of declining polarisation 1800-~1830.

• Rising polarisation until the 1930s.

• Declining polarisation 1930s-60s.

• Rising polarisation since 1970s.

This pattern matches the pattern of relative wages. (I haven’t examined these studies and have no idea how robust they are given how dodgy social science can be.)

Turchin argues we’re in a transition from the pre-crisis phase to the crisis phase. Those politicians defending moderation and cross-party cooperation are losing and retiring. This is the third crisis after the Civil War and the 1930s.

Historically, elite competition is resolved by violence, jail, exile etc.

The post-war ‘mainstream’ consensus comprised roughly of:

• Patriotism.

• Anti-communism/socialism.

• There was a ‘normal’ family and widely accepted male/female roles. Alternatives were marginalised.

• Divorce very problematic for elected officials, atheism disqualifying.

• Jim Crow laws in the South.

• Progressive taxation.

• Support for Social Security, unemployment insurance, welfare benefits for needy.

• Low immigration.

Pretty much all of this has blown up.

And we see the emergence of counter-elites as political entrepreneurs.

During crises political entrepreneurs try to direct the energy of angry masses. E.g Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus.

In the last 250 years disillusioned lawyers have been a fertile ground for entrepreneurs. Robespierre, Lincoln, Lenin, Gandhi, and Castro were all trained as lawyers then defected from the elite. (It’s dangerous being a counter-elite. E.g Savva Morozov, one of the wealthiest industrialists in Russia before the Revolution, gave a fortune to his workers. And he financed Iskra (the Spark), the banned revolutionary newsletter. After the 1905 revolution he spiralled into despair and shot himself. The commies took all his property from his wife and Lenin took his Gorki estate.)

Trump [and the Valley coalition supporting him] fits the pattern.

Core argument on Trump’s rise

Tuchin argues similarly to me about Trump’s rise. Many elites have latched onto conspiracies about Trump to avoid facing reality about his rise:

A. Trump positioned himself to champion those who have suffered from trends of immiseration among non-graduates while …

B. Insiders — DEM and GOP — have been determined to live in a parallel world, in ‘a massive denial of service attack on their own perceptions of reality’, as Marc Andreessen calls it, while…

C. Elite fragmentation opened up the political game to political entrepreneurs prepared to play outside normal rules.

(Turchin doesn’t point this out by I keep stressing it — the mainstream view of Trump is that he is very extreme (now even ‘fascist’) but in 2016 he was seen as less extreme than normal GOP candidates and in 2024 similarly he was seen as less extreme than Kamala. This is also an important sign of how elites are running DOS attacks against their own perceptions of reality.)

American plutocracy

Turchin considers different regimes:

• Egypt as a military regime.

• Iran as theocracy.

• China as a bureaucratic empire.

• America as a plutocracy.

Before the Arab Spring, the Egyptian regime:

• Expanded access to university. Combined with a youth bulge this meant a) a big growth in number of graduates, b) more intense competition for jobs.

• Mubarak groomed his son to take over via an MBA and business, breaking the rules of the regime game. When the crisis erupted in 2011, the army stood aside.

• The coalition that drove Mubarak out was part Muslim Brotherhood, part liberal secularists. They immediately turned on each other. The army threw out the Brotherhood. As for 1,000 years, military elites are back in charge.

The ‘America plutocracy’ theory: America is run mainly by the economic elite via lobbying, donations, appointments, media ownership, foundations/think tanks etc. The military are integrated: in return for loyalty they get lucrative posts after retirement. Schools, universities and social events help the networks self-organise. [NB. Turchin’s description is similar in basics to Curtis Yarvin’s description of the ‘cathedral’!]

The size of the top fortune:

• $1M in 1790 (Elias Derby) — equivalent to 25k annual average wages;

• 6M in 1830 (Girard);

• 20M in 1848 (Astor);

• 40M in 1868 (Vanderbilt);

• 1B in 1912 (Rockefeller) — equivalent to 2.6M annual average wages (100X growth in a century);

• but then it stalled at about 1B until the 1960s.

The top federal tax rate grew from 7% in 1913 to 24% in 1929 to 94% in WW2 and was still ~90% in 1960. [This is reflected in the movie High Society when Grace Kelly shows Sinatra around the grand houses of the American aristocracy and tells him their misfortunes from high taxes!]

Today taxes on companies and billionaires are at their lowest since the 1920s.

If your net worth is $1-2 million today you’re in the top 10%.

Before 1850 all American presidents were one-percenters. Since then nine presidents including Lincoln and Truman were not millionaires in today’s dollars. Bill Clinton and Obama have over $200M are in the top five richest presidents.

There are ~50 members of Congress with net worth over $10M.

As elite competition has intensified, more money has been spent on political campaigns. The average spending of a House winner rose from $400k in 1990 to $2.35M in 2020 and in the Senate from $4M to $27M — a six-fold increase. And a presidential race now involves raising over a billion.

In 2021 12k lobbyists spent $3.7B at federal level. The top industries are pharma, electronics and insurance.

The theory predicts that policy will reflect desires of the rich, versus the theory taught-in-schools of America as a representative Republic, per Lincoln.

And work by Gilens shows that from a data set of 2k policies 1981-2002, with preferences of rich/poor etc, the outcome is clearly that the rich and business groups get what they want and the poor/median do not.

So Turchin argues:

1. The poor do not shape policy results.

2. The rich shape what policies are discussed.

3. The rich try hard with some success to shape the preferences of the public to fit what the rich want. E.g the ‘death tax’ meme invented, thinks Turchin, by a ‘brilliant if evil propagandist’. (Turchin thinks the voters don’t realise they are unaffected and it only hits the superrich. I don’t know about America but in Britain this is NOT true, voters oppose death taxes knowing they are unaffected on the basis that a) it’s in principle unfair and b) maybe (hopefully) their kids will be affected. I suspect it’s similar in America and Turchin is confused like many academics/pundits on this subject.)

What about immigration?

Polls show strong opposition to illegal immigration.

No federal law mandates businesses to use E-Verify to determine the status of potential employees.

The big thing is not net effect but the winners (big business, rich people hiring gardeners etc) and losers (non-graduates in places with overstretched services and infrastructure). Hence Marx saw the English regime importing Irish as exploitation. Unions generally opposed immigration from 1880s, when Carnegie called it ‘a golden stream’, to 1970s.

Turchin doesn’t really explain this well.

But I would summarise it as:

• Political and business elites agreed in the 1990s immigration is good.

• Legal and illegal immigration grew plus chaos became visible.

• The public became more angry.

• Elite fragmentation meant people like Trump and Elon sided with the voters.

• Insiders and richer DEM graduates polarised further becoming MORE pro-immigration. The issue was not very polarised in 1991 but has become much more polarised. (This is clear in the data.)

• Trump has now largely stopped chaos at the southern border and this is popular with most of the country but ‘fascism’ to DEM/MSM Insiders who still won’t face reality on this subject.

A crucial aspect of the reorientation of Left parties over 30 years has been the way they have radically shifted on immigration. How much of this is because of education realignment and the different perspectives of graduates viz non-graduates?

It’s particularly interesting how the Left in UK defend a system that involves children drowning in boats and a huge organised crime network extending to the recreation of sex slavery across the western world. They’d much rather see this continue than our regime stop the boats and the children drowning. But they’d prefer us to set up a route where they can fly in legally without fuss in unrestricted numbers.

I.e The ranking of their preferences is:

1. Open borders.

2. The dumb boats continue with drowning and sex gangs.

3. Controlling borders, dumb boats stopped etc.

How crises play out

There are two main datasets used by academics: the peace research institutes in Norway and Sweden and the PITF project funded by the CIA. A PITF member is Walter, author of How Civil Wars Start, which I’ll look at next.

I won’t go into the PITF model details.

They claim 80% accuracy on predicting instability on the basis of mostly just four characteristics (I think the predictions are ‘within the next 2 years’ but haven’t checked this).

They claim the most unstable regime type is partial democracies with factionalism — defined as sharply polarised and uncompromising competition between blocs with winner-takes-all approach, confrontational mass mobilisation, intimidation, manipulation of elections etc.

Other factors:

• armed conflict in neighbours

• state repression against a minority group

• high infant mortality.

Walter’s book presents a similar picture. She adds the internet, smartphones, social media.

The most common paths to chaos are A) an autocracy democratising under pressure of elite conflict and public mobilisation or B) democracy sliding towards autocracy for similar reasons.

Turchin: the data for these projects is limited to post-war. And predictions from the PITF data seem to be getting worse. E.g it missed the Arab Spring. We’re embarking on a period of long-term instability so we should assume the dynamics will involve things not well predicted by this sample — we need a more historical view. And Waters can be ‘woefully inadequate’ (p174) partly because she does not look deeply into the elite crackup that precedes the crisis.

Russia, Belarus and Ukraine after 1991

Russia

1996-2000 the oligarchs had to move on from drunken Yeltsin. In all important ways Russia had disintegrated since 1991 and almost everyone but the oligarchs/mafia were struggling. Chechnya kicked off. After 1998 there was financial crisis and default. [Viz Russia the terms oligarchs and mafia are interchangeable — not all oligarchs are the same viz their propensity for murder but none of the billionaires could be so without mafia alliances.]

The silovki, i.e military-security officials, allied with parts of the mafia. Putin was ex-KGB and in the 1990s worked with the St Petersburg mafia. Once he took over, with the help of oligarchs, the oligarchs then either had to make deals or be crushed. They were deeply unpopular and fragmented. The silovki were coherent and controlled the hard power. The silovki then took a lot of the oligarchs stuff. Oligarchs who remained billionaires did so only because they were useful to, and accepted the terms of, the silovki.

The regime ended the Chechnya war, got the finances under control, and got the economy growing. Protests 2011-13 went nowhere.

Belarus

Lukashenko did not copy the Yeltsin privatisation/sell-off to mafia and did not create an oligarch class like Russia.

Like Russia, he kept his grip on the silovki.

All protests fail.

Ukraine

They privatised and created oligarchs-mafia.

The economy was run for the mafia. Belarus median GDP grew faster than UKR.

The mafia-oligarch gangs fought each other for political power. Elections didn’t stop the oligarch struggle.

West UKR was more pro-West.

East UKR was more pro-Russia.

The oligarchs were west-oriented because they wanted money, property, kids etc stashed in the west. The UKR mafia, like the Russian, wanted big houses in London and their kids to Eton and Oxbridge or Ivy league. This orientation made them susceptible to pressure from the US and Europe — e.g sanctions, bank freezes etc.

UKR was also the fault line of NATO. From 2007 the neocons pushed US policy towards enlarging to UKR. [Obama resisted but did not stop the drift.] Victoria Nuland [archetypal neocon, huge supporter of UKR to NATO etc] spent $5 billion of State Department cash buying influence over UKR oligarchs and in 2014 was recorded talking to the US Ambassador about divvying out UKR government jobs.

None of the mafia governments could maintain a grip. There are four main clans: Dnipro, Donetsk, Kiev, Volhynia.

Yanukovych (Donetsk, headed by Akhmetov) won in 2010 and jailed Tymoshenko (a gas oligarch). But he then stole too much. The Donetsk clan bailed on him.

Yanukovych then (end 2013) bailed on a trade deal with the EU because the terms seemed politically terrible.

Crowds gathered in Maidan Square. The oligarch Poroshenko (Volhynia) funded the protests and owned Channel 5 which covered them. Yanukovych’s support was in the east. Far right extremists were moved in to Kiev. Violence sparked. The oligarch TV stations flipped. Oligarch financed politicians flipped. Security services withdrew from Maidan Square. He fled to exile in Russia. A civil war sparked in the Donbas with pro-Russian forces fighting Azov and regime forces. 14k were killed 2014-Jan 2022. Zelensky emerged from conflict between Poroshenko and Kolomoisky. [Zelensky recently fell out with Poroshenko and has sanctioned him.]

Turchin concludes: the revolution was not a people’s revolution, it was, as usual with revolutions, mainly driven by elite conflict. The main factor explaining the difference between UKR, Russia and Belarus is whether the ruling elites keep cohesion under pressure.

In Russia and Belarus the silovki have stayed together and with Putin.

In UKR, no silovki government emerged, it stayed a battleground for mafia-oligarchs. UKR had privatisation — i.e mass theft — Belarus did not. The silovki in Russia obviously take a lot for themselves but they also want the public to get a share in growth to keep them quiet — they are not all-out fighting with each other to steal everything and ignore the people, as in UKR before the war or in Russia in the 1990s. [Though the Russian system is obviously super-dependent on personal relationships and Putin’s personality, if he had a stroke/died then the complex precarious balance of interests across the silovki could unravel fast.]

[Here isn’t the place to go into UKR in detail but it’s important that the story of the UKR mafia has been disappeared in western MSM since the war started and instead the story in the BBC etc presents UKR as a roughly normal country with a heroic ‘democratic government’, heroic leader etc, a bad fiction. The relationship of the Zelensky faction with oligarch-mafia is disappeared. The role of the US interfering in local politics is disappeared. Given how much of the western elite turned against the neocons, it’s all the more interesting that they’ve ended up supporting the neocons’ UKR-to-NATO project, launched in 2007, because of how it was repackaged. Right now, the entire western project for UKR since the war started is in humiliating chaos.]

How does the crisis play out?

The model tracks indicators:

• Workers looking for jobs.

• Immigration.

• Social attitudes.

• Supply of jobs.

• Automation.

• Wages.

• Relative wages: wages grow slower/faster than profits and GDP p/capita. If slower, then rich get more from growth, if faster then creation of super-rich is choked off. When relative wages decline, people are more miserable and elites capture more wealth. High political chaos physically kills the rich, takes their money, discourages them from acquiring more etc.

• A political stress Index that combines the strength of immiseration and elite overproduction.

Turchin argues that the key role in crisis events is ‘extremists’, those radicalised and primed for action. Radicalisation, social contagion, works like disease spread and he uses equations similar to the epidemiology models. His model tracks normals, radicalised, and ‘recovered’ (i.e radicals who become disenchanted). As the fraction of radicals increases the chances of riots etc rises.

The model predicts growing political violence in 2020s America which reduces elite numbers then the situation moderates but the economic situation returns and the cycle of violence returns in 50 years.

It also predicts that even if steps are taken now to change relative wages the inertia is so strong there will still be violence. But in this scenario a short sharp burst of fighting in the 2020s is succeeded by stability.

What blocks civil war?

• For the moment there is a coherent police force that follows orders.

• There is no coherent organisation like a Communist Party aiming at real revolution.

• The radical left is ‘hopelessly disunited’.

• The radical right — defined as white supremacists, neo-Nazis, KKK, alt-right etc— is similarly disunited. If you look at the plot to kidnap Governor Whitmer, it was so disorganised the FBI informants had to organise it. (NB. It’s wrong to lump ‘alt-right’ in with KKK etc, much of the alt-right is NOT racist!)

• Left dissidents are also divided. And marginalised: e.g people like Chomsky are not invited on MSM. (Very questionable argument! People with Chomsky views are all over MSM!)

But he argues the GOP is (i.e 2022) transforming into ‘a true revolutionary party’. Although Trump has served the plutocracy in some ways (e.g taxes) he is against them on others especially immigration and against a lot of Insider GOP on foreign policy (e.g NATO). Bannon is clear that he wants MAGA to ‘destroy all of today’s establishment’. But Trump1 showed he didn’t know how to drain the swamp.

Turchin of course is writing in 2022 and does not know how the Trump/GOP story plays out.

But he describes America 2022 — with its combination of immiseration, counter-elites emerging from elite overproduction and political entrepreneurs — as a ‘revolutionary situation’.

What about Europe?

In Germany and Denmark the top 1% has grabbed more of the wealth in recent decades, though less than in America.

In France and Austria it has not.

He does not explore Europe in much detail.

1830-70: how England and Russia swerved revolutionary crisis

Turchin’s database suggests that once states are past a certain threshold of crisis, the odds of revolution, civil war or both is high (75%) and in a fifth of cases the civil wars drag on for a century or more. There are very few cases where societies escape with little damage.

He considers the period 1830-70 — coincidentally the period I focused on in my earlier blog on regime change.

• Nearly all European states experienced revolution or civil war or both. France had three.

• America and China had civil wars.

• In Japan the Tokugawa regime fell in 1867.

• Only Britain and Russia of big states swerved meltdown.

England

Crisis grew 1830s-50s:

• Population growth and labour oversupply started depressing real wages from ~1750.

• After the Napoleonic wars there were outbreaks of riots, revolutionary plots etc that were suppressed (e.g Peterloo). 3 arrests at public gatherings in 1758, 1,800 in 1830, deaths peaked at 52 in 1831.

• Elite overproduction. University enrollments surged after 1750.

• The Chartist movement.

Why no revolution?

• Millions, along with aspiring elites, emigrated relieving pressure.

• 1832 reform Act.

• 1834 Poor Law changes.

• Repeal of Corn Laws, cheaper food.

(Turchin focuses on material specifics but a deeper reason was: the English Parliamentary system was more adaptable than other regimes and the English aristocracy preferred to share more power than risk revolutionary chaos.)

By 1850 real wages recovered the losses. After 1867 wages grew at unprecedented rate.

Russia

• Average heights of peasants fell in 18th C.

• Elite overproduction. Number of nobles grew and as fraction of population. And they extracted more from serfs.

• More riots in 19th C, ~10X 1800-1848 then more than doubled 1848-58.

• Russia suffered the Crimea War defeat in 1856.

The combination of riots and the shock of defeat convinced the regime they had to free the serfs. The Tsar told the nobility — it’s inevitable, we should free them ourselves not wait for revolution.

Nobles lost out and many became counter-elites. Anarchists, revolutionaries, terrorists of all kinds spread, peaking in 1880s. The Tsar was killed in 1881. But they did avert revolution. Riots fell. But the calm only lasted until 1905 when revolution broke out after the disastrous war with Japan. Estates failed in the new economic market. The gentry youth which had their traditional path taken away by their parents’ failure entered the civil service and this meant university numbers more than tripled 1860-1880. A combination of poverty and radicalisation as they read western books was dangerous.

Turchin’s conclusion?

His main conclusion is: to have even a hope of escaping the disintegration, the general public, the 99%, must force the elites to share more wealth and power!

This is not an adequate plan!

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Some thoughts

Democrat/Insider radicalisation.

He doesn’t grapple well with a critical issue: how and why DEM elites radicalised culturally. I discussed this at length in the ‘why Trump won’ blog so won’t repeat all that, just a few points…

A. Immigration. Sanders argued in 2015 that open borders was a ‘Koch brothers plan’ he opposed. But by 2024 the DEMs had shifted so far on immigration that the Bill Clinton/Obama positions were effectively defined as ‘racist’. As I say above, we think of immigration as extremely polarised (in Britain too) but it wasn’t 30 years ago.

As I’ve said many times, it was objectively irrational for the DEMs — from the perspective of optimising for winning Presidential elections — to let the southern border blow into chaos 2021-4 then claim it couldn’t be stopped without new laws. It gave Trump one of his top 3 issues. (And Trump has proved this was false — the chaos has evaporated without new laws.) Also the calculation that all the immigrants and Hispanics would vote for the DEMs because of their open borders vibe turned out to be a blunder — per my blog on Trump’s win, he did spectacularly well with Hispanics and immigrants.

B. Institutions/Ukraine.

The DEMs were a party defined by people who thought of themselves as the ‘heirs of 1968’, the party fighting the establishment especially the military-industrial-CIA complex etc.

But one of the puzzles is how their radicalisation to the left on cultural issues went in parallel with becoming the party defending the old establishment institutions and even the intelligence services.

This has been very clearly expressed in the phenomenon of AOC and Bernie — people who consistently argued against GOP military adventures — backing the war machine over Ukraine.

Why? Because, as I’ve said before, the war against Putin equals the war against Trump in their minds. It’s one of the most interesting, important yet almost totally invisible because it’s so big phenomena of the past decade.

C. Free speech

Another fascinating case study is how the party that sees itself as the heirs of 1968 became a party with former presidential candidates openly arguing that the First Amendment was a historic mistake that needs fixing!

If you watch SW1 NPCs, they simply downloaded the Democrat/Insider software patch and either agreed or disappeared it from their discourse. But it is a seismic shift and, like with (B), almost totally invisible inside the NPC memeplex.

If professors of political science and our pundits can very quickly shift their attitude on something so fundamental, it suggests something very profound has been going on.

D. DEI/trans/BLM etc

Turchin doesn’t get into the reasons for why the young, i.e 15-25s have fragmented and become much more likely to support Trump, particularly young men, than Millennials.

The battering of LGBTQ++ at school. Are you gay/bi/queer/trans? Are you autistic? Are you trapped in the wrong body? The battering of ‘toxic masculinity’ and ‘racist’ and ‘America is evil’. The DEI regime in universities and jobs pushing out whites who watch minorities with worse test scores get places.

You can see a very strong backlash against this underway that Insiders cannot see straight because they cannot discuss their own radicalisation away from the mainstream while trying to claim they are the mainstream.

Turchin criticises a lot of ‘extreme ultraconservative’ think tanks funded by billionaires such as the Federalist Society. But a lot of things seen by academics like Turchin as ‘extreme’ are seen by others as ‘moderate’ and ‘arguing for a view seen as mainstream 50 years ago’.

He does not similarly attack the Far Left billionaire network which went so far they provoked a load of billionaires to abandon decades of political neutrality and support Trump because he seemed a moderating force. He calls them ‘reformist’ and ‘progressive’. But many would call them ‘crazy communist loons with blood on their hands’ for defund the police etc. Turchin does not explore why famous Democrats like Elon and Rogan ended up backing ‘the fascist’.

Campaign vs mimetics?

Some on left and right have suggested that the ~2012-2024 DEI/w*ke/trans madness cultural movement that engulfed American politics (and spread via the internet across the world) was partly caused by the plutocracy preferring everybody losing their minds about this to focus on the cost of living and the rich getting richer from QE etc! Peter Thiel has described how convenient it is that everyone’s focused on this nexus of issues, encouraged by elite universities that have in some ways become hedge funds with faculty attached and don’t want their finances scrutinised.

It’s impossible to answer this with confidence without doing a lot of private interviews with people like the CEO and board of Disney. For sure, a lot of the corporate elites were frightened by the power of the movement to destroy careers, terrorise boards etc. Therefore they tipped more fuel on the fire that threatened to burn them. But to what extent was the phenomenon explicitly an organised cynical campaign by the rich to distract people from thinking about and campaigning on economic issues? (Please leave links to good sources on this.)

This connects to a more general question about the DEMs: to what extent was the shift from the party of the working class to the party of the rich, via the educational polarisation I’ve discussed, a thought out ideological project-campaign combining ‘centrist’ economics — i.e Larry Summers is broadly happy — with far left culture war? To what extent was this largely unconscious mimetics that emerged partly through internet herding dynamics?

My constant impression watching these people is that less than 1% is organised, thought out campaign and ~100% is pure mimetics. I think almost all the shifts in elite business networks were ~100% pure mimetics plus fear generating a cascade. But there are of course Live Players (and accidental players) somewhere. E.g the Russiagate hoax came from the likes of Jake Sullivan, it wasn’t a bottom-up internet conspiracy.

And NB. preference cascades below: once Trump won again a preference cascade operated in reverse with business/finance networks quickly ditching DEI etc.

‘Cliodynamics’ and prediction

As I’ve described before, it is possible to use models and technology to shock the mainstream on politics. We proved it with polling/models in 2016/19. You subscribers saw what I said about the US election long before it happened. The Ben Warner/Alex Cooper startup is developing some of these ideas.

The Tetlock and similar experiments similarly show it’s possible.

And there’s a wide variety of experiments on things like predicting news, predicting conflict that I think show promising results.

But academia is bad at this because, partly, incentives are all about papers not products. And for complex reasons the military and intel worlds have not been good at procuring interesting products for this.

In the appendix to War and Peace, Tolstoy wrote about the potential for models to predict wars if they could get good numbers for morale, because whether soldiers really feel like fighting or running is both crucial and extremely hard to know until it’s revealed. In 20th Century, there were attempts at building models such as the Osipov-Lancaster equations, Dupuy’s Understanding War, the recent SESHAT databank.

Turchin talks about projects to collect data but he is probably not on top of technological developments. He wrote in 2022 that robots can’t read medieval Latin on vellum — but Nat Friedman is using ML to read burnt ancient scrolls in ancient Latin and Greek! Turchin’s description of SECHAT makes it sound like something that will be totally upended by LLMs.

Such projects need great historians, other specialists, and great data scientists used to dealing with very messy data challenges.

I have some ideas on how this could be done. I’ve followed developments in prediction in a wide range of fields. I’m confident that products could be built that would greatly improve performance in political campaigns and government.

But new products a) will give strategic advantage but b) will not fundamentally transform politics soon because the essence will remain the simplest and deepest problems like — can you maintain focus on priorities amid chaos, can you move really fast, can you say No, can you build great teams, can you face very unpleasant unreality etc etc.

It’s hard for products to help humans do these fundamentals because the core issue is not ‘can we do high performance’, the core issue is that normal government institutions are not optimising for high performance or even normal/rubbish performance — they are optimising for preserve existing power and budgets and close anything down that threatens them/us. Products can no more overcome this than ‘read Thucydides and Sun Tzu and General Groves’: people do not apply these lessons because the costs are very high, immediate and personal, but gains are ephemeral, long-term, and distributed (what I call ‘the Munger principle).

It was not hard to build the sewage monitoring product but Whitehall shut it down.

It was not hard to build the Vaccine Taskforce but Whitehall shut it down.

It was not hard to build the No10 data science team but the Cabinet Office repeatedly tried to shut it down.

The SAS was shut down after 1945 and is under attack from its political bosses today.

Etc etc.

Secrets, ‘preference falsification’, intelligence and prediction

Some disorders occurred today but nothing serious.

British Ambassador, three days before 1917 Revolution

This is a hooligan movement… If the weather were very cold they would probably all stay home. But all this will pass and become calm if only the Duma will behave itself.

Tsarina Alexandra, two days before 1917 Revolution

Revolutionary crises repeatedly surprise almost everyone. For example:

• 1789. Louis XVI did not anticipate the crisis.

• 1917. The Tsar did not anticipate the crisis. Lenin said in 1917 that older men like him would not see the explosion. The Bolsheviks in Petrograd in the months before the revolution were not prepared for it. Per the quotes at the top, even in the last 2-3 days before the explosion the British Ambassador and the Tsarina expressed the view that the crowds would soon blow over.

• Iran 1979. The Shah’s regime, the CIA and the KGB were surprised by the Shah’s collapse. Even though Khomeini said publicly the regime was about to collapse, he confided to his confidants that he doubted it.

• Eastern Europe 1989. Almost nobody anywhere predicted what would happen.

After they occur there are libraries filled with ‘explanations’ but we keep getting shocked. The libraries haven’t led to a theory with good predictive power.

Timur Kuran wrote an interesting paper in 1989, Sparks and prairie fires, which suggested the concept of preference falsification as part of the answer.

• In coercive regimes it’s dangerous to say what you think therefore the overwhelming majority do not state their true opinions about a regime publicly, they falsify their preference.

• The regime seems secure even to intelligence services probing weaknesses.

• When crises erupt, once dynamics cross a threshold (that’s very hard to identify in advance) more and more people will state their true preference and this makes it more likely that others do the same — a preference cascade. Opinions are interdependent and this process is inherently nonlinear. Hence the ancient proverb quoted by Mao: ‘A single spark can start a prairie fire.’ The spark can be somewhat random. E.g On 23/2/1917, there were thousands on the streets because of food shortage rumours, then 20k workers were locked out of a factory, then women marched in celebration of Women’s Day, and hundreds of off-duty soldiers joined in. There was a large self-reinforcing mob not coordinated by anybody.

• In hindsight the regime’s collapse seems inevitable because it generated ‘a panoply of hidden conflicts’.

• So regimes can both appear highly secure but be highly vulnerable.

• Leaders are crucial because a few rare people have an exceptional ability to detect and expose the regime’s vulnerabilities. E.g Khomeini knew the army was crucial and he kept stressing to his supporters that they should not physically attack soldiers — ‘Do not attack the army in its breast but in its heart’. Marx denied this and Engels famously summarised the Marx view as, ‘In default of Napoleon another would have been found.’ Cf. Tocqueville’s comment at the top — the leader depends on circumstances having ‘prepared men’s minds’ for new ideas.

• Revolutionary regimes tend to undertake campaigns of repression and indoctrination because the players remember how quickly the previous regime crumbled. The French sent Danton and Robespierre to the guillotine. Stalin slaughtered his own Party on an unprecedented scale.

• Given people in the regime can get killed when it collapses, their failure to see what’s happening is not a simple failure of incentives.

• Marxists think that discontent automatically leads to revolt but this ignores the interdependence of people’s political choices. And generally the vast majority of analysis treats events like 1979 as an ‘inevitable’ product of discontent, deprivation etc.

• The importance of preference falsification/cascades as an important dynamic means that ‘predictive failure is entirely consistent with calculated, purposeful human action’.

• The theory can be falsified by a theory capable of predicting revolutions well. (NB. Kuran’s articles were pre-internet. Now it is possible to acquire vast data that can help predict dynamics that before were almost entirely hidden. Progress would not necessarily falsify the theory IMO.)

In 1991 Kuran considered the 1989 revolutions.

The 1989 revolutions, like 1979, surprised almost everyone — politicians, academics, journalists, intelligence organisations.

The only polling study Kuran was aware of reported that a year after the fall of the Wall, only 5% of East Germans said they had expected it to happen before it did. Presumably the true number was lower.

In China, Deng had ordered in the army to crush the Tiananmen protests. But on 7 October 1989 when protests broke out in Berlin the response seemed weak. Pictures played on East German TV alerting people both to protestors and a weak response. On 9th, Honecker ordered officials to block a demo in Leipzig by force if necessary. But it didn’t happen. People saw peaceful demonstrations. More took to the streets. The regime started offering concessions.

In Poland the Party had allowed elections which Solidarity won. In Hungary, the Party rebranded itself the Socialist Party. And Gorbachev declared that the Soviets would not interfere in the affairs of their neighbours and a press spokesman declared ‘the Brezhnev doctrine is dead’ — a profound example of where one man’s decision can have massive historic effect via a cascade. Imagine if Deng had behaved similarly in 1989.

This pulled the rug from under those considering violent repression across Eastern Europe. Crowds grew and spread everywhere. In days the Wall was down and regimes were toppling. With the partial exception of Rumania the security forces melted very rapidly. And once Insiders started publicly distancing themselves from the regime, this hastened the end. (Kuran rightly says that a proper model would weight defecting Insiders much more heavily than a random individual.)

Havel’s 1979 essay had predicted that when the greengrocers have had enough the regime will fall. Like almost everyone, Havel didn’t have a good sense of the timing but his essay did explore this phenomenon of preference falsification and cascades.

The process in Poland took years, in Hungary months, in East Germany weeks, in Prague 10 days, and in Romania hours. This acceleration suggests that successful challenges to the regime lowered the perceived risk of dissent elsewhere.

It is a black mark that Turchin does not refer to these issues explored by Kuran. And it reflects that Turchin sees revolts too much in long-term economic terms and too little in terms of the interdependency of opinion and preference cascades.

Britain on the edge of chaos?

Obviously Britain exhibits key dynamics Turchin discusses:

• Public immiseration.

• Public perception that the old regime is incompetent and morally lost.

• Elite overproduction, elite fragmentation, counter-elites emerging.

• Growing disorder, perception police losing control of some areas, perception that the police are increasingly on the side of our enemies in similar ways to the Cabinet Office helping Sinn Fein/IRA against SF.

• Growing fears about core infrastructure failing.

• Debt out of control, debt interest payment eating revenues.

• Geopolitical tension exacerbating domestic problems.

• Political entrepreneurs arguing explicitly for radical change.

The core problem for the old regime is that the mix of Tories 2010-24 and Starmer since 2024 can’t en masse even see what’s behind the crises. They’ve told themselves fake stories for decades. They keep thinking if they just hold on and keep going, somehow things will ‘return to normal politics’. You could see this emotion across the media in 2021 when everybody in SW1 cried out for ‘a return to normal’ by which they meant carrying on as before covid. Yet the country had just been through the collapse of core institutions, over 100k killed by incompetence, hundreds of billions added to debt etc. The emotional desire inside SW1 to pretend was so powerful it provided the ballast to their hysteria over Ukraine — while they made ever more ludicrous claims about the war, their desire not to disrupt SW1 business as usual was so strong that they maintained the MoD on its pathological course so it was totally impossible for it to do what they said they wanted vis Ukraine, and, obviously, this visible from space contradiction could not be a topic of SW1 discussion and still isn’t.

The voters assumed summer 2020 that the government would embark on radical change, as promised in the 2019 election. We started (or rather continued what we started in 2019). But then the Trolley took fateful decisions. Governments keep prioritising keeping Whitehall and the NPC network happy and this is not consistent with reducing voters’ hate and contempt.

The way to keep the SW1 NPC network happy is to continue the immigration Ponzi, continue the financial Ponzi, raise taxes, hate and mock entrepreneurs, demand more and more money tipped into the failing things, prioritise the ECHR (and international law generally) over the safety of British families, vandalise the few great things left, give some pathetic speeches about ‘sensible gradual consensual grownup reform’ that officials laugh at and ignore/subvert, declare all this ‘inevitable’ and ‘sensible' government’ from ‘serious grownups’ and declare all opponents extremist, populist, far right etc.

This has been the ‘mainstream’ for 20+ years.

There are, though, for the first time embryonic networks inside both old parties starting to grapple with the themes of this blog and ask themselves: perhaps we need to change our mental pictures radically and side with voters against the 'NPC mainstream…? And very powerful forces will keep pushing this way regardless of how the NPCs scream ‘fascist’.

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Having got to here, I will split the other two books into separate blogs or this will get too long! Then at the end I’ll post some thoughts.

In meantime, watch this interview with David Betz, Professor of War, King's College London. He reflects similar discussions I’ve had with people in intelligence, SF etc about the dynamics pushing the UK towards civil violence.

The issues above provoke thoughts about what the PRC has built to predict social contagion and preference cascades, cf. my blog that touches on Qian Xuesen, the godfather of China’s nuclear and space programs, and pioneer of complex systems thinking (cf. Open Complex Giant System, 1993). Xi said in 2013:

Comprehensively deepening reform is a complex systems engineering problem.

Also cf. this about the remarkable fact that the frequency and severity of deadly conflicts of all kinds follows universal statistical patterns:

Lewis Fry Richardson argued that the frequency and severity of deadly conflicts of all kinds, from homicides to interstate wars and everything in between, followed universal statistical patterns: their frequency followed a simple Poisson arrival process and their severity followed a simple power-law distribution. Although his methods and data in the mid-20th century were neither rigorous nor comprehensive, his insights about violent conflicts have endured. In this chapter, using modern statistical methods and data, we show that Richardson’s original claims appear largely correct…

How can it be possible that the frequency and severity of interstate wars are so consistent with a stationary model, despite the enormous changes and obviously non-stationary dynamics in human population, in the number of recognized states, in commerce, communication, public health, and technology, and even in the modes of war itself? The fact that the absolute number and sizes of wars are plausibly stable in the face of these changes is a profound mystery for which we have no explanation.

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Local election results

Data shows that it is the worst result for an Opposition ever by far: the government is deeply unpopular and obviously rubbish yet Tories lost 41% of seats fought. This election was the first time the Conservatives did not win a majority on a single council since the local government system was created in 1889.

Reform also dominate second places

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To ponder… There is an ancient Greek myth about the star constellation known as Pleiades, or the ‘seven sisters’. Zeus saved seven sisters from rape by turning them into stars. One fell in love and went into hiding, so we only see six. There’s a remarkably similar story in Aboriginal Australia, separated from the rest of humanity for tens of thousands of years.

Astronomers recently calculated that 100,000 years ago, humans would have seen seven stars but one gradually got closer to another so we can now only see six. Yes: the implication is that the remarkably similar stories that have survived through different ancient cultures are surviving remnants of an older story from our ancestors that was true. I’ve read Greek myths to my small child and I think about this beautiful story often. Somehow this is connected to the spiritual-epistemic collapse of the West.

US forces and imperial failure. This NYT article provides more data for the transformation underway in war. The US spent a billion dollars over a month firing so many very expensive missiles the DOD worried about depleted stocks, getting expensive drones shot down, failing to establish air dominance over the Houthis, nearly suffering the humiliation of advanced aircraft destroyed, and suffering the humiliation of two $70M aircraft falling off the edge of an aircraft carrier as it swerved violently to avoid being hit itself. After a month of this, Trump pulled the plug.

On April 28, the Truman was forced to make a hard turn at sea to avoid incoming Houthi fire, several U.S. officials said. The move contributed to the loss of one of the Super Hornets, which was being towed at the time and fell overboard.

For over twenty years I’ve been saying that official calculations and claims around carriers are bogus because of cheapening/improving capabilities for precision strike. Steve Hsu has charted this in detail for 20 years. Notice how one brilliant physicist with the sensibility to look for what’s true could outperform a multi-billion dollar bureaucracy that incentivises blindness.

A few podcasts/blogs always interesting:

• Steve Hsu’s Manifold.

• China Talk.

• Jack Clark of Anthropic.

• Upstream.

• Rest is History (one of few UK podcasts I think is great).

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