Peter Turchin: Entering the Age of Instability after Trump

[Mikebert]

New post. This one on the current social moment in sociocultural terms

https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/cyc...calization

[pbrower2a]

Stresses include changes in who gets the goodies and the girls (if men), who gets respect and who doesn't. The decline in factory jobs has devastated the people of little education. We have more people who have sought to evade menial and servile jobs, the classic dead-end jobs, through education, and those are exactly what many well-educated people get. We have a religious divide between fundamentalist Protestants and everyone else. The fundamentalist Protestants tend to reject and even vilify science (as Jimmy Swaggart calls evolution, "EVIL-ution"), which is not good for getting ahead in life.

Automation of workplaces has made the labor hours once necessary on the job to produce what people need much shorter. So we have the "experience" economy to sop up workers and the tendency toward bureaucratization -- but bloated bureaucracies devour what would otherwise be shareholder profits and ultimately cause the decline and fall of venerable companies. To be sure many of these bureaucrats are well-educated people often lacking the ability or desire to be entrepreneurs, and if they were out of work they would be reading Marx and Lenin instead of owning some over-priced, allegedly adventurous guzzler that suggests that they might be taking a rugged outdoors journey along the monotonous traffic of the Schuykill Expressway or the Tri-State Tollway.

Stress relates to insecurity, and people trade off happiness and its potential for security that might be at best illusory. People often turn against each other in a race to avoid the worst... and people shove others down in futile efforts to protect themselves, $crewing themselves in the process. Donald Trump serves that well, but he is hardly alone. Right-wing media used to promote thrift, self-control, entrepreneurialism, self-development, and financial caution; that is over. These media turn people against each other.