Amazon Author Page : Lance Miller
Referenced interview:Will the elites ever behave? Aspirational oligarchs could spark a revolution. - BY PETER TURCHIN AND MARY HARRINGTON unherd.com
Main Action Shots of the Interview
TURCHIN: Exactly. What we see in the historical record is that all complex societies go through periods of good times, maybe a century or so long on average, and then periods of disintegration. During the good times, after a couple of generations, the elites get used to the fact that life is good and stable, and that’s when the iron law of oligarchy kicks in. The elites are very strongly tempted to convert their power into goodies for themselves — and if there’s nothing stopping them, that’s what they do. They basically reconfigure the economy in a way that depresses the wages of workers and creates a “wealth pump” that funnels riches directly to the owners and managers of corporations.
TURCHIN: Precisely. Those elites in the US and the UK had 30 glorious years. But by the late Seventies, they started getting selfish. That’s when we began to see the separation between worker productivity and worker compensation. And immediately — within another 30 years — the numbers of uber-rich people exploded in the United States. The number of decamillionaires, those with $10 million or more, increased tenfold from the Eighties to 2010.
I agree with Turchin (and probably got some ideas from him) about:
- Elite overproduction.
- Elites are neither good nor bad.
- They are a necessary managerial hierarchy, because we live in a society.
- They cyclically start out as the hero revolutionary visionaries and end up corrupt self dealing degenerates (ideally stretched over multiple generations.)
- The current elite have been degenerates since around 1970 and this has something to do with economic stagnation.
I disagree about:
- Turchin says the elites are basically the 1% or decamillionaires. No, that's an arbitrary threshold and not the natural boundary of our elite class culture. Unlike any previous civilization our elite is massive, maybe 10% or even 30%. It is unlike any bureaucracy seen before the 20th century.
- Turchin gives the wealth pump a lot of weight, but I see it as one of many side effects of degeneracy. Also its less of a pump than people just kicking the ladder down behind them. Inequality and wealth concentration isn’t a problem in itself. It's too easy to confuse important producers with useless parasites. The problem is that people don’t trust the system. Feeding envy and distrust doesn’t solve anything.
- Turchin sees Occupy Wall Street, Antifa, etc. as anti-elite revolutionaries. I see them as degenerate hooligans employed as the elite's morality police. The new KKK. (The Proud Boys and Oath Keepers aren't revolutionaries either. Moms for Liberty and Gays against Groomers are. So are the Yang Gang, Mises Caucus, etc. Revolution doesn't mean politically motivated violence or theatrics, it means actually trying to overturn the political order.)
It's not about who has a lot of power and money. It's power with or without money, money with or without power, and celebrity with or without power or money. It's not about haves vs have nots. It's mostly about people who think they deserve to have more without contributing anything special.
It's not about tearing people down. It's about not bailing out the too big to fails. If you need special treatment then you were never special in any way that deserves our support.
Simply put I don’t want to overthrow 30,000 imaginary oligarchs. I want to see 30 million actual wokes mocked into submission.
An income level or net worth threshold is not a class, and our society is basically classless. Our elite is a culture.
I want to replace the politically correct elite culture of experts and bureacrats with an even BIGGER elite class of patriotic Americans with common sense.
I want more millionaires and billionaires, not because they deserve it but because it's a man's duty to try sometimes, and women should support that.
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