The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse

The Atlantic ^ | December, 2020 issue | Graeme Wood

[Mariner]

eter Turchin, one of the world’s experts on pine beetles and possibly also on human beings, met me reluctantly this summer on the campus of the University of Connecticut at Storrs, where he teaches. Like many people during the pandemic, he preferred to limit his human contact. He also doubted whether human contact would have much value anyway, when his mathematical models could already tell me everything I needed to know.

But he had to leave his office sometime. (“One way you know I am Russian is that I cannot think sitting down,” he told me. “I have to go for a walk.”) Neither of us had seen much of anyone since the pandemic had closed the country several months before. The campus was quiet. “A week ago, it was even more like a neutron bomb hit,” Turchin said. Animals were timidly reclaiming the campus, he said: squirrels, woodchucks, deer, even an occasional red-tailed hawk. During our walk, groundskeepers and a few kids on skateboards were the only other representatives of the human population in sight.

The year 2020 has been kind to Turchin, for many of the same reasons it has been hell for the rest of us. Cities on fire, elected leaders endorsing violence, homicides surging—­­to a normal American, these are apocalyptic signs. To Turchin, they indicate that his models, which incorporate thousands of years of data about human history, are working. (“Not all of human history,” he corrected me once. “Just the last 10,000 years.”) He has been warning for a decade that a few key social and political trends portend an “age of discord,” civil unrest and carnage worse than most Americans have experienced....Havoc at the level of the late 1960s and early ’70s is the best-case scenario; all-out civil war is the worst.

[Mariner]

A surprisingly apolitical and enlightening article from The Atlantic.

Man rediscovers anacyclosis.

[a fool in paradise]

>>The year 2020 has been kind to Turchin, for many of the same reasons it has been hell for the rest of us. Cities on fire, elected leaders endorsing violence, homicides surging—­­to a normal American, these are apocalyptic signs.

Trump didn’t endorse violence but the Left sure has.

And if you look at the 1970s things were as bad if not worse. THOUSANDS of far left bombings in America. Famous serial killers and crime off the charts in NYC.

[Mariner]

Your comments don’t seem related to the article...just a phrase in a long article.

[a fool in paradise]

It’s a false premise.

Then again the Atlantic has a history of such lead-ins. There was an attack on GW Bush because he owned a baseball tearm (the Rangers) and the Astros played at Enron Field. Atlantic originally claimed he owned the team that played at Enron Field and after SEVERAL online published rewrites of the opener they had to drop their attempts at tying him to Ken Lay.

[Mariner]

But it’s not a premise of the article...

[RatRipper]

Need to take longer to digest this article. Interesting. Bookmarking.

[dfwgator]

Could be raining.