Mother Jones; Courtesy of Peter Turchin

Pessimism is in. Swaths of the global elite are uncertain enough about the future to be fortifying their doomsday bunkers designed to evade both popular uprisings and climate catastrophe. “Billions must die,” a meme that germinated in alt-right, blackpilled internet communities that see mass death and depopulation as inevitable, is shared with only a note of semi-irony. Whether it’s making art about mass extinction events or taking part in ambiently self-destructive behaviors like smoking cigarettes, other expressions of pessimism’s cousin, Nihilism, are in vogue among segments of the cultural vanguard.

Data backs up the notion a lot of people see gloom on the horizon. As of January, 63% of the country believes the economic outlook is worsening. Under a quarter of Americans think the country is headed in the right direction; over 40% believe that a civil war is at least somewhat likely within the next decade.

The Russian-American academic Peter Turchin doesn’t think this outlook is just a vibe. Turchin, who helped develop an area of study known as “cliodynamics,” which attempts to scientifically quantify how history moves forward, predicted in 2010 the US would see a significant uptick in political violence by 2020. Today Turchin’s cliodynamic models remain pessimistic. In his 2023 book End Times, Turchin says political violence and societal instability have already increased, a condition that is here to stay for another five to 10 years, even if we started trying to fix things.

Turchin posits that the operation of what he terms a “wealth pump” has disproportionately benefited the top sliver at the direct expense of every other socioeconomic band. With too many people aspiring to join the top echelons and not enough slots—as Turchin argues in End Times, citing an array of historical examples—the structures holding society together start to get a bit shaky.

People get more radical in the name of political ends: They do things like storm capitol buildings, threaten federal judges, and take part in ominous convoys. And if the conditions that are generating surges in violence are left unresolved, he warns they start to get substantially worse. Turchin and I spoke last month about this cycle of wealth capture and resentment that he sees at play not only across history, but in my generation.

Can you explain what cliodynamics is and what you were trying to achieve in developing it?

We live in large-scale complex societies, which are quite recent in our evolutionary history. That’s one big question: How did this happen in the last 10,000 years? But also, the states in which we live periodically experience social breakdown and fragmentation, and even worse things like civil wars. So the other question is: Why are our societies so fragile?

History has a long and detailed record of thousands of states over the past 5000 years. And historians, when they write books, they offer explanations. We can treat them as scientific hypotheses, but they are not compared with each other using data, which is the essence of science. Science is not only about erecting theories, it’s also about testing them and rejecting them, like in physics or other natural sciences. This is what cliodynamics does.

Human social systems are complex systems with nonlinear dynamics and without mathematics, you cannot really understand what is going on in them. And why is that necessary? Because without understanding why societies go into these end times, periods of social instability and potentially political collapse, we cannot avoid them, or at least resolve them in a way that is less costly, in terms of human lives.

You used cliodynamics in 2010 to predict political instability in 2020. What did you see in your models that forecasted this?

It was not a prophecy. Predicting the future with any accuracy is essentially impossible. What scientists use prediction for is to separate good theories from bad theories. Good theories make good predictions, bad theories make bad predictions.

What I did in 2010, there was a theory called structural-demographic theory. It has been built on studying about a couple dozen examples. In the past, it suggested the mechanisms of why societies go into social instability and potential collapse. In around 2007 and 2008 I looked at the trends, which by that point had been developing for a couple decades in clearly bad directions.

I was drawn to your work because the arc of my life sort of falls........

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