Surfing Our Kondratiev Wave

Do, or drown. At least the choice is simple.

This is a document that was written by a small group who were asked to explain what will happen next. There’s one section that really jumped out at me. You won’t have trouble finding it.

Attention Conservation Notice:

It’s someone else’s think piece. If you think piece, please do a proceeding.

The Dark Times Are Upon Us

Antonio Gramsci: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: Now is the time of monsters.” - quoted by Ezra Klein

Understanding why the dark times - the role of theory.

Theory helps us understand both WHAT is happening and WHY it is happening. Theory helps us understand what we are looking for and what we are seeing.

Without a theory of the dark times, we are even more ‘in the dark’. Theories can be wrong, but they are a starting place for both understanding and for action.

Donald Trump is not the cause - he is the effect. If you assume that ‘Donald Trump’ is the problem, you will attempt solutions that don’t target the real drivers of the crisis we are in. Better problem definition creates better possibilities of designing and executing effective collective action

The Whys

• Kondriatev long cycles - massive technology driven change inevitably runs into a wall of social stagnation, causing collapse, rebuilding, renewal… after massive, catastrophic social displacement. If we are very, very wise, and very, very fortunate, we may avoid apocalyptic violence.

• Peter Turchin - Heading for a Fall? uses “the mathematics of complex systems to history in an attempt to uncover underlying patterns. Using this approach, I discovered that violent political instability follows two cycles, one peaking every 50 years or so, superimposed over another that does so every two or three centuries. Applying this to the US and western Europe, I was shocked to discover that these societies were well advanced on the road to crisis. In 2010, in Nature, I forecast that crisis would escalate and peak during the 2020s. A decade later, the evidence supported that prediction.”

• Capital in the Twenty-first Century (Thomas Piketty) - inequality as an emergent phenomenon - Inequality is not the product of specific people or agents no matter how toxic or powerful they may be or appear. Incremental social inequality is a more ‘natural’ phenomenon. It is a product of our social/economic structures; it is a meta-phenomena beyond human agency. The drivers of social inequality are hard built into the nature of the human social/economic world, and have been since we evolved beyond hunter/gatherers.

• Gini coefficient: Skyrocketing inequality intrinsic to capitalist systems drives immiseration, unrest, and creates the conditions for collapse. Cyclical immiseration triggers catastrophe: world wars, pandemics, great depressions.

• resentment and hope (Krugman)

Immiseration drives demographic crises which drive immiseration

Peter Turchin - Heading for a Fall?

• demographic pressures create demographic collapse.

• “But the two main indicators of impending crisis are “popular immiseration” – meaning stagnating or even declining well-being of the majority of the population – and “elite overproduction”, which refers to a society producing massively more elite wannabes than the number of power positions available to them. These two indicators are linked because, to effectively challenge the status quo, popular discontent (feeding off immiseration) needs to be channelled and organized by dissident elites (those frustrated in their quest for influence and wealth).

Ezra Klein:

• “Fears of falling global fertility are to many on the right what climate change is to the left: the master problem of the age, the slow-moving crisis that is even now destabilizing societies. “Population collapse due to low birthrates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming,” Elon Musk wrote. JD Vance has written that “our country’s low birthrates have made many elites sociopaths.”I wish that worry over falling global fertility was not quite so right-wing-coded. I agree there is something troubling about countries that have ceased to reproduce themselves. There is tragedy in how many people don’t end up having the families they desire. The number of children American women say they want has barely budged over the decades, but as marriage rates decline and childbearing is pushed into later years, the number of children women actually have has fallen. This is not just some quirk of American culture. We are seeing it all over the world. In April, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that the U.S. fertility rate had fallen to a new low of around 1.6 births per woman — well below the 2.1 that is broadly considered an adequate replacement rate. The European Union average is closer to 1.5, with Germany recently falling below the U.N.’s “ultralow fertility” line of 1.4. South Korea is down to 0.78 births per woman, a rate at which the country will sharply contract over a few generations. The only wealthy country with a fertility rate above the replacement rate is Israel. It is harder for societies to remain stable as they shrink; South Korea’s demographic crisis has contributed to its recent political turmoil. Growth becomes elusive when populations decline. Fewer adults supporting more retirees is a recipe for discontent. It would be nice if scarcity concentrated the political mind, focusing countries on what growth is available: immigration, technological advances and more natalist cultures.In practice, we see none of these things. Anti-immigrant sentiment rises, as it has both here and in Europe, and gender relations worsen, as they have in South Korea. People are a source of power, growth is a source of optimism and shrinking societies fear long-term decline. Russia’s falling birthrates seem to have played some role in President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine. As countries across the world see their populations fall — some of them quickly — we are entering a new demographic era, and I am skeptical that it will be a stable one.

As a result, Americans are navigating a collective epistemological crisis of toxic polarization.

• Scissoring (the splitting of complex issues into simple dyadic fighting points) is a psychodynamic process writ large on a social level. Scissoring is increasing in volume, velocity, and variety. Issues are ‘scissored’ by political actors and agents and weaponized as narratives against their opponents - on ‘both’ sides. This creates a society in which there are multiple mutually exclusive world views which reinforce and create multiple realities - absolutely vivid and ‘real’ whether radical or middle-positioned on either right or left

• These multiple epistemological positions are often described as sources of ‘disinformation’ (deliberately lying) or ‘misinformation (mistakenly believing something not true). This characterization frames the competing world views as ‘true’ (mine/ours) or ‘false’ (yours/theirs). However, narrative and epistemological wars are fought on the basis of meaning rather than ‘truth’ and ‘fact’. It’s not so much a matter of true and false as what is considered as important — what matters to the adherents of a given worldview/episteme/narrative identity (these terms are cognate). While it is certainly not literally true that ‘immigrants are eating our pets,’ adherents of TrumpWorld do not care that this claim is false. They care about the feeling/emotion/what matters - ‘I hate immigrants’ or ‘I feel threatened by immigration.’ There is NO amount of ‘correcting’ this worldview on the basis of fact - only on the basis of feeling because TrumpWorlders already know that this claim is … metaphor, poetry, ‘real’ in terms of how they fee.

• Not all realities/epistemes/narrative identities/world views are created equal - but they are equally real for their adherents/participants. All worldviews have some basis in facticity, and a rock solid foundation in myths, meanings, and archetypes.

Hegemonic/Counter-hegemonic alternation

• The current domination of right wing extremism is structural - not personal. Historic contestation and periodic state-change in the hegemonic consensus is part of how social systems function. It is a feature, not a bug and it goes far beyond any specific political actors or human beings. We are currently in a period of great turmoil - the last time we saw this level of churn was between WW1 and WW2. Smaller or larger swings and variations which have take place since the 1940s are due to the polarizing events of specific time periods and to historical positioning on the Kondriatev long wave.

US politics and votes are divided neatly down the middle 50—50.

• This is not an accident - it’s an artifact, a construct of our political system which ‘fights for the middle’ and tries not to lose the sides (edges of the ideological positioning) - an example in real life of the ‘bell-shaped curvification’ of social reality (creating ‘normalized’ bell-shaped variation is something we do, not something we discover).

• American politics has been primarily centrist for many years, but the definition and position of the center changes over time (through the ‘Overton Window’ effect). Liberalism and conservatism alternate in dominating our society’s ‘common sense’ understanding of the world. The liberal consensus has shattered and the fascist/right-wing extremist (RWE) consensus has rushed to fill the power void. Whether the fascists can retain power remains to be seen.

• This alternation is not exactly rhythmic or timed; but the two worldviews (epistemes) are always in a contest due to the limitations of any ideology/position and the nature of power. Those who have power want to keep it; those who don’t, want to get it. Narrative warfare in the contest for power - access to resources — is as old as humankind - and hegemonic/counter-hegemonic alternation is as old as governance.

We have hollowed out political parties

U.S. political parties - both Democrats and Republicans - are currently driven by personalistic politics which causes chaos and instability. The big political parties are in crisis, and ‘politics as usual’ has been cancelled.

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The big question now is finding the small points of action, the cracks and fissures that might allow / or encourage the rolling chaos to stabilize before total meltdown while avoiding the provocations of the TrumpState… the trap laid for the resistance is to lure them into peaceful protest which is then met with state violence, including agents provocateur, which triggers ‘martial law.’

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American politics as a slasher-film franchise

Just when we think it’s safe to go back into the water, the house, the closet, the dark… our nightmare returns to hunt and to haunt us. We can’t seem to wake up from a bad dream. We have a range of possible futures from recovery to collapse. We should always allow possible positive futures in our wargaming/scenario mapping

- Best case: 2026/2028 “disenchanted voters once again punish the incumbent party”

- Worst case: civil war, totalitarian state, wide-spread state violence, gulags, death camps, purges, assassinations.

Planning for the dark times

Mapping possible futures/the range of possible political outcomes from least change to most change, least harm to most harm.

Narratives of change and stability are viewed differently by protagonists; if your world is working for you, radical change can be seen as harm. However, if you are immiserated and desperate, ANY change can be seen as potentially healing or at least an opportunity for escape.

The Scale - How bad can it get? very bad indeed?

• levels of bad - from disgusting and awful to apocalyptic

Develop “boundaries of possible outcomes” by asking for best- and worst-case scenarios.

Ezra Klein: “I consider the range of outcomes for Trump’s second term to be stupefyingly vast, stretching from self-destructive incompetence to muddling incoherence to authoritarian consolidation. But the levees that narrowed the possibilities of his first term have been breached.”

Level 1 - Least Bad: Stagnation, instability, return to stability.

Trump again proves incapable of governance, and those around him fight themselves to a standstill. The existing governance structures of the United States - the Supreme Court, Congress, mainstream media, the Democratic Party, US corporations and industry, US academia - prove to be resilient enough to withstand the MAGA assault. It is a painful, grim, scary time, but financial crisis limits some of the political damage intended by Dark MAGA, the US succeeds in returning Democratic power to Congress in 2026 and in the 2028 presidential elections, returning Democrats to the presidency. It is essentially a replay of the Great Depression and WWII. With nukes. Democrats are able to stabilize the political structures enough to return to ‘business as usual’ and we are now adequately motivated as a country to draw back from the brink, and bring the impoverished, immiserated middle class back into stability, adequate prosperity, and hope for a better future.

Level 2 - Bad: the Putinifcation of the United States.

Trump and his entourage succeed in an RWE/fascist/authoritarian take-over of US government. The United States suffers surveillance, repression, atrophy of active politics, state terrorism towards its own citizens. MAGA rules through fear, targeted assassinations, control of all media. Putinification is a form of putrification - a political and social form of rotting

Level 3 - Apocalyptic: The Collapse into Anarchy and Totalitarianism

• further immiseration of working class/middle class/technical elites.

• acceleration of economic inequality.

• widespread civil unrest, demonstrations.

• widespread purges of the military, IC, other civilian branches of govt.

• peaceful protests turn violent/violent repression of protest.

• systemic and systematic use of violence against political opponents.

• show trials and gulags.

• political assassinations turned inward.

• weaponization of the state against political opponents.

• Palantirization - Palantir technology deployed against citizens.

• weaponization of the state against citizenry.

• totalitarian security state.

• all-out civil war - division of the military against itself.

• breakdown of state/federal system.

• militias, gang warfare.

• destruction of electoral cycle and collapse of democratic structures.

Tipping points and tells

• series of staged false flag ‘terrorist’ attacks.

• large scale political demonstrations which start out as peaceful and end up with the state-sanctioned/state-perpetrated murder of protestors.

• declaration of martial law.

• wide-spread and spiraling state violence against civilians.

• surveillance state technology deployed against citizens.

• schism within the US military.

• Civil War 2.0 goes from cold to hot, up to and including the deployment of nuclear weapons within the United States against its own populations.

Why won’t it probably go nuclear - Peter Turchin - Heading for a Fall?

• “The reason human societies became more resilient is that they became more complex – albeit, in a certain way. This sounds surprising: it is a common trope in archaeology that complex societies are highly prone to collapse. Indeed, in his influential book The Collapse of Complex Societies Joseph Tainter at Utah State University argues that it is precisely the accumulation of complexity that undermines stability. But that isn’t what our analysis reveals.To understand this, we need to distinguish between two dimensions of complexity. The first is scale. Most simply, it is population size, the number of people governed by a state or empire. But there are other aspects of scale, including a state’s territory, or how many people live in the capital and other cities. As the scale of a society increases, it becomes harder to govern. Regions away from the capital are more prone to separatism and secession. Tensions arise between different ethnic groups within large multiethnic empires. Because their scale has tended to increase since states emerged some 5000 years ago, this trend should have resulted in them becoming more fragile.

• Useful complexity: But a second dimension of complexity provides a countervailing trend. States didn’t just increase in scale, they also evolved institutional complexity. As a result of interstate competition and conflict, they acquired more sophisticated systems of information processing, economic exchange and governance. State bureaucracies became more effective and so did the constraints on rulers and elites. Like any form of evolution, this entailed survival of the fittest. Put simply, states that failed to acquire this sort of complexity collapsed and their territories and populations were taken over by more capable rivals. Thus, what makes societies better able to resist internal and external shocks is “useful complexity” – essentially, the accumulation of social technologies that make them better organized and more internally cohesive and functional……

• The long arc of human cultural evolution over the past 10,000 years has resulted in increasingly larger-scale societies. Such societies attempted to suppress internal violence, with varying degrees of success. Initially, they were quite fragile and readily descended into civil wars that tore them apart. But they gradually evolved more and better institutions that increased their resilience against internal and external shocks. Collapse became less likely.

• I believe we can exploit this finding to help us achieve a better outcome in the crisis that is currently rocking Western civilization. Modern societies already possess a lot of “useful complexity”, but we need to bolster the practices and institutions we know will make us most resilient to collapse (see “How to avert a crisis”). Also, societies are more interconnected and the problems we face are more global than ever in human history. We must reflect this in the social complexity we embrace if we are to rise to such challenges as climate change, war and inequality.” (End Turchin quote)

Surviving the Dark Times

• DON’T TRY TO SAVE THINGS THAT CAN’T BE SAVED

Start by understanding more, doing less: we need to more clearly understand our division before we attempt to fix it; to do otherwise risks deepening the crisis and the division, the polarization and the radicalization, the toxic spiral leading to civil war and mass death. TrumpWorld wants violence, wants civil war, wants martial law, wants an authoritarian state. Mass civil disobedience opens an opportunity for state escalation of violence which leads to madness and sweaty palms.

Understand liberal moral hazard

• Read Musah al-Gharbi on why Trump was elected twice - don’t believe every word he writes, but pay attention to his overarching argument that intellectual elites have been misled by moral hazard - We Have Never Been Woke.

• Elite, left-wing moral hazard is also the main talking point in In an Age of Right-Wing Populism, Why Are Denmark’s Liberals Winning? While there are plenty of holes, distortions and omissions in this argument, there is enough rationality to be plausible and to convince rational people.

• Read The deep and unavoidable roots of political bias to understand why we are not so very different from our adversaries, and to understand our own sources of bias and weakness

Don’t just do something - Stand There! (and observe very, very closely)

• Listen to people you vehemently disagree with. Keep asking them questions until you find the common human ground on which all of us stand … then claim that common ground and bond … build bridges, not walls, especially to people whose views you find loathsome. This can be done, and should be done. It NEEDS to be done. If we don’t understand them, we have absolutely no hope of influencing or changing them.

• Fentanyl, terrorism, and the ‘End of the United States’ Right before the 2024 election, an associate who is an ardent Trump supporter, insisted that if Harris were elected that ‘would be the end of the United States.’ I kept asking him what he meant… what would happen. He told me a frankly wild story of thousands of terrorist immigrants simultaneously poisoning the salt shakers of diners across the United States with fentanyl, causing mass deaths and panic. I suggested that, while Americans love salt, they don’t use a whole lot of it in any given dish, so probably the terrorists would be better off spiking the sugar shakers with fentanyl for greater impact. When I pointed out that even if such an attack took place, at best only hundreds or thousands of people would die; that would not ‘kill’ the United States, although it would be horrible and frightening. I asked him how the attack would then ‘kill’ the United States.

• He said it would cause martial law to be declared and that Harris would be blamed for the attack and forced from office. I explained to him that martial law in the US gives presidents more power, not less. So, if anything, Harris would be more powerful as the result of such an attack. He then said that Harris would be impeached (it would be ‘legal things’ that ejected her from office). Since he loathed Harris and supported Trump, I asked him why he thought that that would be a bad thing… how would this lead the ‘death of the United States’?

• A few more iterations of questions came to the point… he deeply believes in the Great Replacement Conspiracy narrative - that ‘our’ civilization is being replaced by ‘aliens’ - such as Muslims, immigrants, terrorists. The conversation continued and his final comments helped me understand and connect emotionally to him. “Nobody should be pushed out if they don’t want to go.” He had been told to retire from his job, in which he had considerable prestige, income, and international standing as a technical expert, and had lost that identity on retirement. He had been ‘pushed out when he didn’t want to go.’ That very human sadness helped me understand the baseline emotional truth underpinning his conspiracy-filled narrative universe.

• Life is not a multiple choice test. The answer is always ‘D: All of the Above.’ The world is complicated and simple, single answers are rarely right. Take, for example the question ‘Why did the Democrats lose the election?’ Biden’s illness and weakness, Democratic Party incompetence, disinformation, misinformation, elite capture, elite betrayal, cross-class political alliance failures, inadequate long-term attention to the immiserated middle-class, racism, sexism, Republican lies, Republican ratfuckery, the increasing political illiteracy of the immiserated classes? All of these are causal factors; we can only argue about the degree to which each has contributed, not whether they contributed or not to the collapse.

• Equally, our ideological opponents own a part of the ground we call truth. No one set of ideas/beliefs/positions can ever hope to own ‘all the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’ no matter how much we would like that to be the case. Try and find out where and why your adversaries ‘have reason.’ That implies understanding where and why we are wrong. If we do not understand why and how ‘we’ have been wrong, or at least what flaws and weaknesses are inherent in our political epistemology, and why and how our opponents have some form of logic at the base of their unreason, we will never be able to improve our arguments, sway the discourse, or win the war on crazy.

• Cultivate a healthy skepticism. In a narrative war, it’s critical to maintain analytic distance and epistemic neutrality. Do NOT assume that what you read is ‘the truth.’ Even, or especially, the things you agree with. Contested discourses wouldn’t be contested if there was only one single, indivisible ’truth’ to be had in the controversy. There are ALWAYS other truths to be found among our adversaries’ lies. If there wasn’t some small thread of truth, the lies wouldn’t be able to hang together. Find that thread.

• If it is a narrative, it reflects and causes beliefs. If the story exists, whether it is true or false, right or wrong, there is a reason people believe it, even if it seems mind-blindingly obviously wrong. The fact of belief is more important in understanding behavior than the accuracy of the belief. Look for why people find crazy beliefs important and meaningful to them.

• Practice ethnography. Assume that your adversaries are rational and intelligent, in spite of the blindingly obvious stupidity of the things they say and do. Try to understand WHY they believe the impossible. Use anthropology; use ethnography, gather data. Talk to people you can’t stand, ask them to explain their ideas until you get to a place where they say something so clear and so true that you realize that you’ve hit bottom - the real, deep driver of their worldview…all the crazy on top is window-dressing provided by political actors to rationalize their deep hurts, their deep fears and needs and beliefs.

Wintering and Surviving

Sometimes the best play is surviving.

We will only survive by bringing our best game to the challenge.

Exhaustion doesn’t help.

Hope is not a strategy; it is a resource. From hope comes the will to fight, the will to resist; the psychological strength to fight. Ukraine proves that the will to fight is critical to success in conflict. So, the lesson is:

Protect hope and humor.

Remember ‘A Paradise Built in Hell’ - Rebecca Solnit

Humans bond in crisis; we create communities of care. This is a fundamental human instinct, all the more so in crisis - the worse the crisis, the more it calls to the better angels of our nature.