How to Blow Up a Unabomber

(and other tales of Elite Overproduction)

(NOTE: decent length piece that concludes the main argument about 2/3 of the way down, with a bonus round of three truly excellent Cocktail Party Tidbits to dazzle your friends with at your July 4th picnic)

*****

In case you missed it in the thumb-scrolling digital circus that passes for our civic discourse these days, Ted Kaczynski, the OG Unabomber just snuffed it. 

(check this recent film we got to attend at its SXSW premier a couple years ago) 

A writer for the Babylon Bee (the Onion for alt-right Christians) tweeted the opening line to his Unabomber Manifesto:

 "The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race."

Elon Musk replied: "He might not be wrong."

Which, in this era of AI hype, El Nino heat domes and ocean meltdowns, is quite an admission from one of the most industrious industrialists in history.

#whoops 

Thirty odd years ago when the Unabomber posted his infamous manifesto, the condemnation came swiftly and crossed all aisles. Even Lefty enviros and others sympathetic to the general cause, denounced in no uncertain terms his murderous methods.

But in just the last few years, his sentiment, that perhaps our democratic-capitalist game has become so rigged that more violent interruptions are necessary, has been quietly spreading.

See the recent hoopla about the film How To Blow Up a Pipeline that "re-centered" Monkey Wrenching sabotage for Gaia and sparked freaked out responses by the FBI and other intelligence agencies 

The 2019 novel Overstory features a gang of five environmentalists driven to eco-sabotage, arson, and accidental murder.

And it won the Pulitzer!

Kim Stanley Robinson's bestseller Ministry for the Future imagines a black-ops UN sponsored department that clandestinely coordinates with the Children of Kali, an India-based eco-terrorist group who bombs private jets and oil tankers.

They single-handedly cause more change in behavior than all the COP summits and blockchain carbon credit schemes put together. 

(see HERE where I wrote about this in more detail last year).

In fact, Ministry had such an impact on powerful people, politicians and policy makers that the author was invited to keynote the last COP summit!

If we're relying on fiction writers whose best solution to our current crises is a shadowy gang of super ninja assassins, we're in deeper trouble than most of us realize.

---

But the eco-crisis is not what I want to talk about today.

Instead I'm even more curious about a deeper structure lying underneath Unabomber Ted's ascendance that connects to all the other crises we're staring down.

Because, before he fucked off to the woods and his cabin shack, Teddy K was a Harvard wunderkind and UC Berkeley maths professor.

Not a meth-head hillbilly or Michigan militia neo-nazi.  

A thoughtful brainiac of Ivy League pedigree.

So what's that deeper structure underlying our undoing? 

The overproduction of elites.

And that simple dynamic is threatening to undo democracy, society, and even civilization.

Right now.

In front of our faces.

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If you're out of true-crime podcasts, spy thrillers or bodice rippers for your summertime beach reading, consider Peter Turchin's cheerily titled new page-turner End Times: Elites, Counter-elites and the Path of Political Disintegration.

It's quietly brilliant.

Turchin, formerly a bug-scientist, is one of the founders of a fascinating new field called Cliodynamics. That basically means analyzing history using giant data sets rather than grand theories.

(Clio, for those of you playing along at home, was the Greek muse of history, and not coincidentally the name of my Great Pyrenees puppy while I was in grad school studying the same).

Turchin rose to fame in 2010 when the esteemed science journal Nature asked an interdisciplinary set of experts to predict what would happen in the next decade.

His answer?

A spike in political instability, with non-zero chances of civil war by the 2020s.

Needless to say, post 2016 Brex-elections, post Charlottesville, post Antifa/BLM, post January 6th, post presidential perp-walks and pretty much everything else, Turchin's star's been on a steady rise.

His lab tracks half a dozen or so key markers of social decline across thousands of years of recorded history searching for the deep patterns that connect them. But out of all of that sea of Big Data, two things come up again and again as the clearest canaries in the coal mine.

Suffering of the peasants.

And overproduction of the elites.

And of these two, Turchin emphasizes that the "too many nobles and not enough thrones" is the core driver of Great Unravellings.

Because let's face it: pitchforks and torches are rarely as destabilizing as propaganda and palace coups. 

Revolution is almost always an inside job.

Just look at the archetypal example that has kept politicians and historians up at night for ages–the Fall of Rome.

You know, "Barbarians at the Gate" and all that.

The Vandals, Goths and Visigoths, wearing animal skins and horned helmets, topple the Roman world.

Except that's not exactly how it went down.  

Alaric the Goth, the chief architect of one of the more decisive sacks of Rome in 410 AD wasn't just a barbarian.  He was a decorated general in the Roman army, and responsible for defending the empire against all sorts of threats from heathen Europe.  

It was only after his troops got decimated, losing over 10,000 men, that he became disillusioned with the emperor's promises. He realized then he was never going to get the aristocratic promotions, fancy villas and political respect he felt he had coming to him.  

So he marched on Rome and tore that old building down.  

(the parallels to Prigozhin, Wagner's losses in Bakhmut and subsequent march towards Moscow this past week are clear)

When you get too many elites to keep all of them fat and happy, you initiate a cycle of wars, rebellions, and defections–the creation of the "counter-elites" of Turchin's subtitle.

So while Ted Kaczynski was a nerdy outsider in the Harvard Yard, he took that elite perspective and resentment into the wild with him. 

Ironically, it was his insistence that his Unabomber Manifesto be published by those very same elite institutions he'd rejected–the NYT or the Washington Post–that turned out to be his undoing.

His brother spotted his idiosyncratic phrasing and punctuation and turned him in. 

(Larry Fink, the editor of Penthouse offered to publish it, but Ted rejected the offer as too low brow).

---

But take a look at where we are now with the accelerationist, anti-democratic Christian neo-fascist takeover in the US of A, and you realize that the fingerprints of elite overproduction are all over the place.

(and to be clear, I mean that technically and descriptively, not pejoratively). 

You might be all in on their project and hoping it comes to fruition! 

Steve "I want to tear this whole thing to the ground" Bannon is an "accelerationist" looking to speed up the collapse of our current system rather than amend it from within. 

"Anti-democratic" is a fair description for jigsaw puzzle gerrymandering of voting districts, quasi-Jim Crow voting restrictions, and ploys to subvert the popular vote with state-appointed electoral voters.  

(see the Supreme Court decision this week that narrowly defeated an effort to do exactly this)

As many MAGA politicos have been taking care to point out since Jan. 6 "the USA is a republic, not a democracy!"  Their goal isn't to win over more voters to their platform. It's to limit who can vote to those who are most likely to vote in their favor.

And "Christian neo-fascist", simply reflects the quiet part that is getting said increasingly loudly by the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene (and some Supreme Court justices):

“America has been and always should be a unified-Church-and-State Christian nation.”  

Christian morality should be 1:1 reflected in American legality.

Sharia law, but for Jesus Peeps.

Some people are fearing these movements, and others are cheering them. 

Either way, they are pretty much unfolding as described.

So let's take a look at the key players on the MAGA "burn it down" patrol.  The results are fascinating.

Steve Bannon–Harvard Business School, Goldman Sachs

Ron DeSantis–Yale/Harvard Law

Ted Cruz–Princeton/Harvard Law

Josh Hawley–Stanford/Yale Law

DJT–where was it he went to B school again? I forget

J.D. Vance (of Hillbilly Elegy fame)–Yale Law/Thiel Capital

Add on the anti-establishment Democrat, political scion RFK Jr. with a Harvard undergrad and London School of Economics/UVA Law, and we've got a full sweep.

(Side Note: Fidel Castro was a lawyer. Maximilien Robespierre too. Vladimir Lenin as well. Lesson? If you really want stability of government, you should hang all the lawyers) 

And yet, somehow, despite their pedigrees, all of these current American politicians have positioned themselves as vox populi "voices of the people!"  

It's only after they got within sight of the last few rungs of the aspirational ladder that they looked to separate themselves from the edifice they'd been climbing.

---

But let's not kid ourselves.

Sure, all those MAGA guys got into the Ivies, but none of them (except maybe RFK Jr.) got invited into Skull and Bones secret societies like the Bushes, or the swanky dinner and final clubs at Princeton and Harvard. 

Or even invites to "summer" in the Hamptons or the Vineyard with their blueblood Mayflower classmates.

Like Maleficent, privy to the palace, but not invited to Sleeping Beauty's baptism, they cursed the kingdom and then vowed its undoing.

And if "elite overproduction" seems like a weird term in need of defining–think simply that in the 1960's only about 15% of the US population had undergraduate degrees. While today, nearly 70% do.  

Now, being a "college grad" is little more than a box to check on your application to wait tables.

Millions of folks have been sold and enrolled in the education-guarantees-success story their whole lives, so up the ladder they have to keep climbing.  

Only to get to the end of law school or med school, often with six-figures of debt, and realize that AI Legal Zoom and Insurance reimbursement schemes have reduced them to little more than blue collar cogs in a machine.

Doctors, lawyers and college professors–professions that used to reflect the top of social respectability and attainment, are, in this era of tech titans, info-marketing millionaires and #lambo crypto bros, embarrassingly middle class.

Add to that overproduction of elites what Turchin calls the "Wealth Pump"–where owners get to extract more profits out of the system than trickles down to the workers–and you have heightening "immiseration." 

AKA–poverty.  

And a populi  increasingly suggestive to the critiques of the counter-elites.

In our current world of union busting by even the so-called "progressive" companies (see Tesla's, Whole Foods', Amazon's and Starbucks' recent efforts to shut down organizing workers), and massively widening wealth gaps, the wealth pump has been shunting all kinds of extreme profits to the 1%. 

We're suffering more financial inequality today than we did on the cusp of the Great Depression! 

The Prole is understandably pissed.

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But for all of this demographic analysis, what's Turchin's solution to elite overproduction and the inevitable creation of the "counter-elites?"

It's not pretty.

In almost all historical instances, you have to kill them off. 

War. State Collapse. Insurrection. Epidemics.

The guillotine and a Robespierrian Reign of Terror.

Or brute force like the U.S. Civil War which effectively bankrupted or slaughtered most of the Dixie gentry.

Stalin did it.

Mao too.

Pol Pot's hit list was first and foremost all of Cambodia's intelligentsia.  It became a virtual death sentence to be caught wearing reading glasses!

Out of thousands of data sets, Turchin’s lab could only find a few examples of the entrenched elites realizing what's happening and reversing the Wealth Pump just enough to forestall violent revolution.

The "Glorious Revolution" in England and FDRs New Deal “revolution” in the 1930s (that continued through LBJs Great Society moves in the 1960s).

In England, the deal that made that revolution Glorious instead of bloody, was "hey old guard ancien regime stuffy nobles!  We're going to take over now and the bourgeois merchant class are gonna pretty much run things from here on out. You can keep your titles, lands (and heads), but eventually it will all end up Downtown Abbey-style for the lot of you, a bunch of broke ass lords and ladies pimping out your country piles for dough."  

Or, consider the 20th century USA.

Coming out of WWII, the effective tax rate on the top income brackets had climbed to over 90%!  (Today, as Warren Buffet admitted, 1% ers pay lower effective taxes on their incomes than their secretaries).

Back then, billionaires kept only $10 of every Benjamin they pocketed. Imagine that!

With the GI Bill funneling more veterans into university and graduate schools, the whole Keynesian pump-priming project was in full swing all the way through the Sixties.

Wealth was more evenly distributed then that at any time in American history, and it set the stage for the most prosperous decades of the Pax Americana.

That is, until Reagan broke the stagflation of the Carter years with a return to bare knuckles free market ideology.

Clinton cannily realized that this center might actually hold, and ditched the blue-collar union Left (sorry Ol' Joe B) in favor of the NAFTA multi-national corporations. 

Bushes were gonna Bush. No surprises there.

(But in this brave new world, Clintons are gonna collect 400K speaking fees from Goldman Sachs).

Even Obama wasn't dumb or brave enough to upset that golden apple cart.

The wealth pump had reversed and began siphoning prosperity ever upwards. It hasn’t stopped since.

Cocktail Party Fun Fact #1: Obama was to the right of Reagan on tax policy!

(and to the right of W on extrajudicial drone warfare) 

So the Fox News 2008-2016 drumbeat about him being a "socialist" was an utterly transparent dog whistle to old white folks that, (if you had your Cracker Barrel decoder ring) translated to "he's gonna take all your shit and give it to brown folks!." 

Instead, it should’ve read “he’s gonna continue to let the hedge funds and multinationals take all your shit via the relentless mechanisms of Late Stage Capitalism.”

But we digress. 

So what are the odds that the vanishingly small and increasingly concentrated elites running the show these days will be willing to reverse the Wealth Pump and turn trickle-down economics into an actual waterfall of shared prosperity?

Anyone?

Anyone?

For those that aren't exactly optimistic that the last thirty years of increasingly neo-liberal ratcheting is going to reverse anytime soon, here's how Turchin suggests these things usually go.

Generation One: civil or international war, revolutions, violence.

Generation Two: uneasy peace, with the #neveragain horrors of the last conflicts still front of mind

Generation Three: subsequent outbreaks of war by the bratty grandkids who don't remember the wanton destruction of the last lap.

(it's a slightly less heartening version of the old "shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations" quip about intergenerational wealth creation and destruction)

For the United States, if we do nothing proactive to reverse the Wealth Pump and actively redistribute more of the spoils, Turchin predicts the 2020s will get increasingly violent and unstable.

But that will peak fairly quickly, followed by the 2030s-40s of relative restructuring, followed by flare ups again in the 2050s.

Cheery!

That's the argument in brief. About where we're heading, and what we're looking at in the runup to 2024 elections.

So as you scan the messaging and positioning in the upcoming campaigns (or take a second look at passport options in St. Kitts), keep an eye out for the diplomas and resumes behind the populist rhetoric.

And see if what we're witnessing doesn't map fairly neatly to Turchin's analysis?

Also ponder if, in this rampantly neoliberal, free-market age, where even progressives barely mention income and other wealth taxes, whether, maybe, just maybe we should get inspired to more equitably share the love before folks come and take it with hate?

After all, this isn't personal. Or even political.  

It's just historical.

---

Still here?

How 'bout three more fun facts from Turchin's book to dazzle your friends  at your July 4 cookout? 

(Provided you hang with total nerds with unusually intact attention spans).

They're just too cool not to share.   

Cocktail Party Fun Fact #2: apparently, monogamy really is more stable as societal bedrock than polygamy.  So despite their retro-reasoning, Focus on the Family (and Jordan Peterson) weren't exactly wrong. 

That's because monogamous elites tend to produce fewer next-gen elites to duke it out for the throne.

But polygamous empires like the Muslim and Mongol hordes, as Turchin has validated, have too many concubines in their harems, and experience twice the volatility of Christendom. 

It takes them only a century to whipsaw through all of the stages of violent upheaval, while monogamous empires typically take two hundred years.

#slowyourroll

But, (Fun Fact 2.1), the Ottoman Empire identified and then solved this problem in a fascinating way.  When we were in Istanbul touring the Sultan's Topkapi Palace this spring, we learned that the entire Ottoman reign of 600 years was governed by one family. 

Six centuries. Non-stop! 

Practically unheard of.

How'd they do it?

Pretty early on, they realized that marrying their children to other noble houses produced a predictable Game of Thrones dynamic that would unseat them sooner than later.

Too many elite babies with mixed allegiances.

So they modified the plan, and henceforth, their Sultan princes would only marry slave girls captured from far away places.

These hapless lasses would then proceed up through a strict hierarchy in the Sultan's harem all the way up to becoming a favored consort, and possibly even the mother of a prince.

And all of these assignations were kept sorted by Nubian Black Eunuchs who ruled the harem. 

These eunuchs had once been slaves themselves, but then became the trusted royal officers of the palace. 

The sultan employed the Black Eunuchs for a couple of reasons: First, they were foreigners and unlikely to have political associations with local elites.

Second, they were black. And in case their snip-job wasn't decisive, any impregnations of the harem would be immediately traceable.

#BillieJean

And to top it off, they finished by formally enshrining the solution that Turchin has traced throughout history.

As all the princelings vied for the one shot at the throne, the winner was legally entitled to murder all of his brothers!

Just. Like. That.

Cocktail Party Fun Fact #3: Ukraine is a way more interesting story of elite-overproduction and subsequent instability than almost any of Western news coverage would suggest.  

If you're torn between draping a yellow and blue flag over your "In this house we believe science is real" lawn sign, or going down the rabbit hole with Russel Brand and RFK Jr. believing that Putin was justifiably responding to NATOs relentless plans of expansion. 

Or fixated on Hunter Biden's laptop.

Or stanning Zelensky as a selfless hero.

And then giving up trusting anything to go back to making sexy selfies on Dall-E as the world unravels from any knowable truths whatsoever...

Then you'll be pleased to know that, in fact, Ukraine is a totally corrupt nightmare of a feudal oligarch state, divided between two major factions, one on the east with strong affinity to Russia and one on the west with European aspirations.

In fact, before the Soviet Union fell, Ukraine had a higher GDP per capita than either the motherland of Russia or its neighbor Belarus. 

By 2014, its GDP had plunged to $7500 per person per year while Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Russia each had incomes around $20,000.  

The 2014 "Euromaidan Revolution" that was heralded by mainstream Western press as a triumph of democracy was actually just a shuffling at the trough between two feuding oligarch clans. 

The people got shafted both ways, while the U.S State department quietly pumped $5B into handpicking politicos for positions that favored Western trade and banking agreements.

(this is where you can peel off and start tracking Burisma energy contracts if that's your jam)

Even Zelensky, the understandable darling of the Western press since the war broke out, was initially chosen as a puppet to stand in between the former president and the rival clan. 

Since the invasion, however, he's refashioned himself as a war-time president, and may be able to carry that credibility into a reworking of power politics.

Or he may get shoved aside, as overreaching Yanukovych was before him in 2014, when the oligarchs in control of all national media flipped the switch on public support and he was tossed out on his ear. (parallels to the Koch/Murdoch conservative axis vs. the Trump family are also clear)

Remember that pitchforks and torches are rarely as potent as propaganda and palace coups.

Point being: real life is messy and complex and rarely submits to the tidy soundbites on either Fox or MSNBC.  (or the Telegraph and Economist)

But elite overproduction, and the Wealth Pump siphoning profits up the food chain to the oligarchs at the top? 

That's just Cliodynamics.

Which brings us quite nicely to our fourth and final tidbit...

Cocktail Party Fun Fact #4: Cyclical Histories are almost always full of shit.

I know, I know. During those sketchy days of lockdown, you might have geeked out on that book The Fourth Turning, that Bannon's so big on. It just explains so much about where we are these days!

#overthefallsinabarrel

Or perhaps you've been tracking an Evangelical End Times calculator counting down the days to the Rapture.

Or even a New Age Hopi Prophecy/Kali Yuga/Mayan Calendar Dream Catcher.

Or the fact that Pi repeats every three hundred years or so. Or maybe every three decades? It all gets confusing.

But really, they're all off the mark.

Even the really good ones, like Pulitzer winning Harvard prof Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s Cycles of American History.

It's not that there aren't patterns in history. There are. As Mark Twain said, "history doesn't repeat itself. But it does rhyme."

Here's where Turchin really won my heart though. In one paragraph, he neatly eviscerates all that fuzzy logic and motivated reasoning. 

Read it, and forever be the wiser!

"While historian narratives can be deeply informative, the work of amateur armchair theorists is generally useless. These authors are typically not historians and they often know very little history. Ignorance is liberating, but not enough. Amateur theorists use two "techniques" to build their grand narratives. The first one is cherry-picking, selecting only historical examples that fit their pet theories. The second one is the Bed of Procrustes, which enables them–stretching a little here, cutting off a bit there–to force various historical examples to conform to fixed cycles postulated by their theories. Ninety-nine percent of "cyclical history" suffers from one or both of these problems."

Why does this critique of cyclical histories matter beyond book nerds and their ilk?

Because they often form the foundation of apocalyptic cultic thinking!

A quick bit about this from my last book…

On top of everything—things have been getting super weird lately. From the collapse in authority, to global systemic crises, and tangled mythologies—it’s increasingly difficult to tell what’s around the bend.

The seductive pull of Rapture ideologies (and the cyclical histories that often justify them) beckons.

The more uncomfortable and the less certain we are, the more tempting it becomes to find comfort in community. And the most tempting community to latch on to? The one that confidently proclaims to know exactly what’s going on and is certain it’s going to be standing on the right side of history (just as soon as whatever BigTimeCrazyThing that’s gonna happen happens).

Rapture ideologies are like a giant ontological vacuum, devouring everything in their path. That slow sucking sound as you watch friends and family slip down the conspiratorial rabbit hole?

It’s not a rabbit hole. It’s the black hole of the Intertwingularity as all of our End Times End Games blend together. And no one, except the chosen few, gets out alive.

We should expect conditions to worsen on the road ahead.

As plagues, fires, famine, and floods (to say nothing of global cabals secretly running the world, or imminent alien disclosure) ricochet around us, it’s hard not to read into things.

Signs and portents abound.

Omens of Millennium are everywhere.

Meanwhile the echo chamber of social media is taking our shadows and turning them into monsters. By the clicking of our thumbs, something wicked this way comes . . .

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So as we bid ol' Ted Kaczinksi adieu, we can revisit his thesis that "The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race" with some fresh eyes and perspective.

While we're likely to be assessing the pros and cons of the Industrial Revolution for decades to come, the longer, even deeper truth is staring us in the face:

"Elite Overproduction and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race."

Whether we can learn from the past, and mitigate some of those consequences this time around, remains to be seen.

But we can't say we couldn't see this coming.

#nothingnewunderthesun