I just realized that Peter Turchin may have lifted his "Elite Overproduction" thesis from the philosopher Eric Hoffer.
Via ChicagoBoyz, February 21, 2012:
Hoffer on Scribes and Bureaucrats
Nothing is so unsettling to a social order as the presence of a mass of scribes without suitable employment and an acknowledged status…The explosive component in the contemporary scene is not the clamor of the masses but the self-righteous claims of a multitude of graduates from schools and universities. This army of scribes is clamoring for a society in which planning, regulation, and supervision are paramount and the prerogative of the educated. They hanker for the scribe’s golden age, for a return to something like the scribe-dominated societies of ancient Egypt, China, and the Europe of the Middle Ages. There is little doubt that the present trend in the new and renovated countries toward social regimentation stems partly from the need to create adequate employment for a large number of scribes…Obviously, a high ratio between the supervisory and the productive force spells economic inefficiency. Yet where social stability is an overriding need the economic waste involved in providing suitable positions for the educated might be an element of social efficiency.and
It has often been stated that a social order is likely to be stable so long as it gives scope to talent. Actually, it is the ability to give scope to the untalented that is most vital in maintaining social stability…For there is a tendency in the untalented to divert their energies from their own development into the management, manipulation, and probably frustration of others. They want to police, instruct, guide, and meddle. In an adequate society, the untalented should be able to acquire a sense of usefulness and of growth without interfering with the development of talent around them. This requires, first, an abundance of opportunities for purposeful action and self-advancement. Secondly, a wide diffusion of technical and social skills so that people will be able to work and manage their affairs with a minimum of tutelage. The scribe mentality is best neutralized by canalizing energies into purposeful and useful pursuits, and by raising the cultural level of the whole population so as to blur the dividing line between the educated and the uneducated…We do not know enough to suit a social pattern to the realization of all the creative potentialities inherent in a population. But we do know that a scribe-dominated society is not optimal for the full unfolding of the creative mind.
–Eric Hoffer, The Ordeal of Change (1963)
At the time Hoffer was thinking about Asian countries throwing off colonial rulers but he could just as well have been foreseeing the struggles of the credentialed but not-overly-intelligent class [average undergraduate IQ: 102] in the West ca. 2025.
And Turchin?
"The Problem with The Mass-Production of Elites, Looking into DoorDash's S-1 Filing"
The Model That Forecast 2020's Political Turmoil In 2010, Says The U.S. Is Heading Toward Civil War.
I've
said a few times that I don't think the United States will have a civil
war, it is just so rare in established democracies. The only major
exception I can think of is 1861 - 1865 when somewhere between 650,000 and 850,000 people died.
In the in the American Civil War...
"Will the US Really Experience a Violent Upheaval in 2020?"
I don't have enough information to determine if Professor Turchin is correct in his analysis.
I do know that human beings are so good at pattern recognition that we can see patterns that aren't even there.
Here's a twofer, the prediction and the follow-up....
C.S. Lewis On Different Types Of Readers
Although
these days we use pseudo-psycho-mumbo-jumbo like "Confirming my priors"
and "Validating the reader", this old boy was writing about such things
in his SciFi novel 76 years ago:
“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”
— C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 1945
As we saw in yesterday's "Planet of the Grifters"
with it's quick look at Turchin's idea that there are too many elites
and wannabe elites, there is money to be made from feeding the fantasy
of the wannabe. (as the degenerate state of academia shows)
And
that probably accounts for some of the crabbiness we see from folks
who, compared with our billions and billions of forebearers, back into
the mists of time, are among the most privileged and advantaged ever to
walk the earth.
They also get grumpy when reminded of that fact....
Most recently, May 27, 2025:
"The Alienated ‘Knowledge Class’ Could Turn Violent"
Rather than "Knowledge class" they act more like entitled wannabe elites....
