In un articolo pubblicato su The Atlantic, Graeme Wood ci parla di un curioso approccio matematico-statistico allo studio della storia elaborato dall’ex studioso di scienze naturali Peter Turchin, secondo il quale le società entrerebbero ciclicamente in crisi a causa della tendenza della classe dirigente a crescere più rapidamente rispetto al numero di posizioni disponibili per il suo impiego. Questa sovrapproduzione, sostiene Turchin, genererebbe un attrito crescente tra élite occupate e élite inoccupate; alla fine parte di quest’ultime, alla continua ricerca di una collocazione nelle alte sfere del potere, tenterebbe l’ascesa soffiando sul risentimento della base della piramide sociale e favorendo perciò disordini e soprattutto la crescita di movimenti populisti. Secondo Turchin il fenomeno Donald Trump si sarebbe prodotto proprio in virtù delle suddette dinamiche.

Peter 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. In 2010, he predicted that the unrest would get serious around 2020, and that it wouldn’t let up until those social and political trends reversed. Havoc at the level of the late 1960s and early ’70s is the best-case scenario; all-out civil war is the worst.

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