Peter Turchin

The Most Bizarre Era in Human History We are living in the most absurd era in history by a significant margin. To understand our current predicament, we must recognize that we are like fish in a pond who cannot know their place in the world because they only know the water. Modern society has become a century-long experiment in social engineering, establishing intellectual precedents that would have been unrecognizable to every ancestor who came before us. This period, roughly spanning from the World Wars to the present, is a blue-pill era where we have systematically discarded ancient wisdom in favor of the dangerous assumption that human nature is infinitely malleable. Dr. Rudyard Lynch argues that the idea responsible for the most death in history is the belief that humans are inherently perfectible. This blank slate mythology immediately leads to totalitarianism because if people can be molded to any aim, the state will inevitably attempt to break and re-shape them to fit a theoretical utopia. Our ancestors viewed the world with a realistic sense of tragedy and limits. Today, we suffer from a unique combination of psychological neuroses driven by our social structure. While the Middle Ages saw manias like demonic possession or the dancing plague, our era is characterized by an explosion of autism and schizophrenia—conditions rarely recorded in the pre-industrial world. We have convinced ourselves that men and women are psychologically identical, that culture is irrelevant, and that economic progress is an assured law of nature rather than a historical anomaly. By judging all of history by our strange, modern standards, we ignore the reality that every other society believed in the spirit world, the importance of tradition, and the immutable nature of human drives. We are operating on a religious vision of the world while claiming to be secular, and this hubris is the primary indicator of civilizational decadence. The Three Variables of Impending Collapse History moves in cycles of approximately 250 years, each culminating in a global crisis involving mass war, famine, and a radical shift in social structure. These cycles are predictable through computer models that track three specific variables: income inequality, a decline in average wages, and increased competition for elite jobs. When Peter Turchin and other historians plug these variables into historical data, they align perfectly with the French Revolution, the religious wars of the 1600s, and the Black Death. We are currently witnessing an era of inequality that ranks in the top 5 to 10 worst periods in human records. This destabilization occurs because, during periods of peace and growth, the value of labor shrinks while the value of capital grows, leading to an extremity where the system’s greatest strength becomes its fatal weakness. We have purposefully depreciated wages through a combination of mass immigration, the doubling of the labor force by bringing women into the workplace, and automation. While the supply of labor has increased by nearly 40% over demand, the quality of life for the average person has plummeted. A lower-middle-class individual in the mid-20th century, exemplified by the fictional Homer Simpson, could own a home and support a family on a single income. Today, that reality is out of reach for even the upper-middle class. When the average age of marriage rises above 28, a political crisis is statistically inevitable. Humans are designed to breed first and be rational later; when the incentive structure for reproduction is removed, people lose their stake in the status quo. If the current system offers you no path to success, you have a rational incentive to roll the dice on a revolution, even if it carries the risk of death. Historical String Theory and the Roman Parallel To predict the next five years in America, we must look at Republican Rome. Rome, like the United States, was a democracy with two competing parties: the optimates, representing the deep state and foreign-allied elites, and the populares, the populists who sought to restore the middle class. As Rome conquered the known world, it imported slaves that destroyed local labor, leading to absurd levels of wealth concentration. The Roman middle class died, traditional culture collapsed, and religion decayed. Into this vacuum stepped the Gracchi brothers, wealthy tycoons who ran on a platform to make Rome great again by reclaiming the land for the Roman people. The Roman deep state slandered the Gracchi brothers, claiming they were tyrants trying to destroy democracy, and when legal maneuvers failed, they assassinated them. The parallel to Donald Trump is striking. In the Roman cycle, the death of the populists led to a loss of faith in the system, causing the citizenry to split into factions and eventually support ideological warlords like Julius Caesar. When a population loses the incentive to cooperate with a centralized government that does nothing for them, they seek radicals who promise to protect their specific interests. If Donald Trump were removed from the board, the American right would likely fragment into warring factions—Libertarians, theocrats, and fascists—who would compete for dominance through violence, much like the aftermath of the Gracchi assassinations led to a century of Roman civil war. The Science of Social Pressure and Radical Cadres Most people assume that because they have air conditioning and social media, they are beyond the barbarism of the past. However, history shows that the masses do not start revolutions; small, organized cadres of radicals do. During the French Revolution, the Jacobins constituted less than 1% of the population. The Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution were a mere 3%. Game theory suggests that 60% of any population will simply do whatever the group consensus dictates. If the consensus shifts by even a small margin, the majority will follow the new dominant force to avoid social friction. We are currently in a period of intense 'ennui'—a French term for a lack of connection to the world—where the average person is mentally stuck in 2010 and cannot comprehend that we have transitioned into a sci-fi dystopia. This lack of connection is exacerbated by 'mask morality,' a performative ethics that requires no actual change in character. When a society replaces a objective value system with subjective postmodernism, it loses the ability to argue against mass violence. If everything is an interpretation, there is no moral barrier to killing millions for a utopian goal. The bloodiest events in history, from the Holocaust to the Stalinist gulags, happened within living memory. Human nature has not changed in seventy years. We are simply sedated. Chris Williamson posits that porn, video games, and social media act as a 'mass opium' that prevents young men from organizing. While these surrogates provide a titrated dose of satisfaction, they do not cure the underlying subconscious desperation. The explosion of mental health issues is a signal that the human psyche cannot be tricked by digital replacements for status, pride, and reproduction. The Tragedy of Modern Civilization and the Path to Resilience Industrial civilization has created a bureaucracy that demands the individual sacrifice their animal nature for the sake of the system. In the pre-industrial world, the family was the economic unit, and every social connection was intimate. Today, we know more bureaucracies than we have friends. This 'oversocialization' forces us to wear masks constantly, suppressing natural drives for chauvinism, possession, and the divine. The Unabomber argued that this system would eventually require genetic engineering to turn humans into compliant cogs. In response to this pressure, the left has doubled down on social engineering, while the right has collapsed into a cynical, soulless reactionism. Both sides are increasingly materialist, losing any concept of the inner soul or character. For the individual seeking to navigate this coming crisis, the solution lies in finding an asymmetric advantage and a spiritual grounding. Resilience is found in deciding what you are willing to die for, as having a cause worth dying for is the only way to have a life worth living. We must stop treating political enemies as soulless objects and instead seek truth, honor, and freedom. The game has become difficult, but as Rudyard Lynch suggests, it is better to play a hard game and feel your heart breathe than to play a boring one. We are in a three-year window where the world will change as much as it did during COVID-19. Those who recognize the historical patterns will be the only ones equipped to survive the transition from a decadent era into whatever comes next.