I’m currently audio-reading this book, and what I like about it is that it’s more concrete an argument than similar attempts to explain societal breakdown, such as, say, The Fourth Turning. Basically, the book’s argument goes something like this: if you get too many elites vying for limited resources, then the elites end up fighting each other over resources that become even scarcer, while everyone else becomes really, really poor in the process. The historical examples used in the book are numerous and explained well. Helps make sense of America’s perpetual tumult.

Because the internet enables everyone to know much more about the world at any given moment, including what’s happening in their own societies relative to others, maybe we now can somehow better head off the kind of societal implosions experienced in the past? Like, maybe a WW1 wouldn’t have happened if people were online back then and were like, ‘Hey, this nationalism thing really doesn’t have much to do with me fighting and dying over in Flanders.’ Or maybe it’s the opposite — we instead are prone to rush to judgment/act more impulsively and therefore are more likely to end up dying in the Flanders trenches. Or maybe it’s all a computer simulation and we have no free will 🤷