Born in present-day Iran (then Persia) months after the end of the First World War and raised on a farm in present-day Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia), Doris Lessing (October 22, 1919–November 17, 2013) was fourteen when she dropped out of school and eighty-eight when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature, her long life spent writing keys to “the prisons we choose to live inside.”
In 1957 — the year the British government decided to continue its hydrogen bomb tests, the year the pioneering Quaker X-ray crystallographer Kathleen Lonsdale composed her short, superb insistence on the possibility of peace — Lessing examined the responsibility of the writer in a precarious and fragile world menaced by dark forces, a world in eternal need of those lighthouses we call artists.
Doris Lessing
In what would become the title essay of her collection A Small Personal Voice (public library) — an out-of-print treasure I chanced upon at a used bookstore in Alaska — she writes:
Once a writer has a feeling of responsibility, as a human being, for the other human beings he influences, it seems to me he must become a humanist, and must feel himself as an instrument of change for good or for bad… an architect of the soul…
But if one is going to be an architect, one must have a vision to build towards, and that vision must spring from the nature of the world we live in.
In a passage speaking of her time and speaking to ours, evocative of what James Baldwin so astutely observed in his magnificent essay on Shakespeare (“It is said that his time was easier than ours, but I doubt it — no time can be easy if one is living through it.”), she adds:
We are living at a time which is so dangerous, violent, explosive, and precarious that it is in question whether soon there will be people left alive to write books and to read them. It is a question of life and death for all of us… We are living at one of the great turning points in history… Yesterday, we split the atom. We assaulted that colossal citadel of power, the tiny unit of the substance of the universe. And because of this, the great dream and the great nightmare of centuries of human thought have taken flesh and walk beside us all, day and night. Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares and this is no time to turn our backs on our chosen responsibilities, which is what we should be doing if we refused to share in the deep anxieties, terrors, and hopes of human beings everywhere.
She distills the essence of our task in troubled times:
The choice before us… is not merely a question of preventing an evil, but of strengthening a vision of good which may defeat evil.
[…]
There are only two choices: that we force ourselves into the effort of imagination necessary to become what we are capable of being; or that we submit to being ruled by the office boys of big business, or the socialist bureaucrats who have forgotten that socialism means a desire for goodness and compassion — and the end of submission is that we shall blow ourselves up.
Although the looming apocalypse of Lessing’s time was nuclear and that of ours is ecological, the experience she describes is familiar to anyone alive today and awake enough to the world we live in:
Everyone in the world now has moments when he throws down a newspaper, turns off the radio, shuts his ears to the man on the platform, and holds out his hand and looks at it, shaken with terror… We look at our working hands, brown and white, and then at the flat surface of a wall, the cold material of a city pavement, at breathing soil, tres, flowers, growing corn. We think: the tiny units of matter of my hand, my flesh, are shared with walls, tables, pavements, tress, flowers, soil… and suddenly, and at any moment, a madman may throw a switch and flesh and soil and leaves may begin to dance together in a flame of destruction. We are all of us made kin with each other and with everything in the world because of the kinship of possible destruction.
Noting that history has rendered not only plausible but real “the possibility of a madman in a position of power,” she holds up a clarifying mirror:
We are all of us, at times, this madman. Most of us have said, at some time or another, exhausted with the pressure of living, “Oh for God’s sake, press down the button, turn down the switch, we’ve all had enough.” Because we can understand the madman, since he is part of us, we can deal with him.
Observing that we will never be safe until we bridge the gap between public and private conscience, she returns to the role of the artist in a world haunted by the madman’s hand on the button:
The nature of that gap… is that we have been so preoccupied with death and fear that we have not tried to imagine what living might be without the pressure of suffering. And the artists have been so busy with the nightmare they have had no time to rewrite the old utopias. All our nobilities are those of the victories over suffering. We are soaked in the grandeur of suffering; and can imagine happiness only as the yawn of a suburban Sunday afternoon.
Indicting as cowardice our reflexive ways of confronting the gap — by indulging in “the pleasurable luxury of despair,” or with hollow manifestos and platitudes that “produce art so intolerably dull and false that one reads it yawning and returns to Tolstoy” — Lessing locates between them the still point of courage:
Somewhere between these two, I believe, is a resting point, a place of decision, hard to reach and precariously balanced. It is a balance which must be continuously tested and reaffirmed. Living in the midst of this whirlwind of change, it is impossible to make final judgments or absolute statements of value. The point of rest should be the writer’s recognition of man, the responsible individual, voluntarily submitting his will to the collective, but never finally; and insisting on making his own personal and private judgments before every act of submission.
[…]
We are all of us, directly or indirectly, caught up in a great whirlwind of change; and I believe that if an artist has once felt this, in himself, and felt himself as part of it; if he has once made the effort of imagination necessary to comprehend it, it is an end of despair, and the aridity of self-pity. It is the beginning of something else which I think is the minimum act of humility for a writer: to know that one is a writer at all because one represents, makes articulate, is continuously and invisibly fed by, numbers of people who are inarticulate, to whom one belongs, to whom one is responsible.
Noting that the artist — unlike the propagandist, unlike the journalist, unlike the politician — is always communicating “as an individual to individuals, in a small personal voice,” she prophecies the age of Substack:
People may begin to feel again a need for the small personal voice; and this will feed confidence into writers and, with confidence because of the knowledge of being needed, the warmth and humanity and love of people which is essential for a great age of literature.
If you are here at all, reading this, you are feeding the confidence of this one small personal voice while also feeding that part of you refusing the conformity and commodified despair of the stories sold by those who make themselves rich by impoverishing our imagination of the possible.
The village of Blatten has stood for centuries, then in seconds it was gone.
Scientists monitoring the Nesthorn mountain above the village in recent weeks saw that parts of it had begun to crumble, and fall on to the Birch glacier, putting enormous pressure on the ice.
Small rock and ice slides had begun to come down, and the village’s 300 residents, and even their livestock, were evacuated for their own safety. But everyone hoped the unstable rock would disperse incrementally over a few weeks, and that after that everyone could go home.
On Wednesday afternoon, that hope was dashed.
Nine million cubic metres of rock and ice came crashing down into the valley
It was such a force that it registered on every geological monitoring station in Switzerland
Barbara and Otto Jaggi, in the neighbouring village of Kippel, were getting their chimney fixed. The repairman was downstairs checking the system, when suddenly Barbara said: “There was loud banging, and the lights went out.”
At first, she and Otto thought the repairman had broken something, but then the banging, and now roaring, got louder, and the repairman came running up the stairs to them shouting “the mountain is coming”.
Kippel is over 4 km (2.5 miles) from Blatten. It and the entire valley were soon cloaked in dust. Blatten itself was completely destroyed; its homes, its church, its cosy Edelweiss hotel smashed to rubble.
Geologists had been monitoring the situation; that’s why Blatten was evacuated. But no-one, not even the experts, expected such huge violence.
New Thinking Jun 13, 2025 This video is a special release from the original Thinking Allowed series that ran on public television from 1986 until 2002. It was recorded in about 1987. It will remain public for only one week. Georg Feuerstein was a German Indologist specializing in the philosophy and practice of Yoga. Feuerstein authored over 30 books on mysticism, Yoga, Tantra, and Hinduism. He translated, among other traditional texts, the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and the Bhagavad Gita. Here we discuss his book Structures of Consciousness: The Genius of Jean Gebser: An Introduction and Critique. Now you can watch all of the programs from the original Thinking Allowed Video Collection, hosted by Jeffrey Mishlove. Subscribe to the new Streaming Channel (https://thinkingallowed.vhx.tv/) and watch more than 350 programs now, with more, previously unreleased titles added weekly. Free month of the classic Thinking Allowed streaming channel for New Thinking Allowed subscribers only. Use code THINKFREELY.
New Thinking Jun 12, 2025 Eric Wargo, PhD, an anthropologist, is author of Time Loops, Precognitive Dreamwork and the Long Self: Interpreting Messages From Your Future, From Nowhere: Artists, Writers, and the Precognitive Imagination, Becoming Timefaring: Time Travel & the Human Future, and most recently Where Was It Before the Dream? His website is https://www.thenightshirt.com/ In this interview he focuses on the creative works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Shelley, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Franz Kafka. He suggests that their creative genius often stems from a precognitive anticipation of their own lives, and particularly how their individual works will impact themselves in later life. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:02:57 Reductionist literary criticism 00:09:09 Time loops in literature 00:20:16 Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan 00:27:23 Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein 00:35:45 J. R. Tolkien’s Hobbit 00:44:02 Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Trial 00:58:16 Einstein’s debate with Henri Bergson 01:03:05 The story of Caedmon 01:06:45 Conclusion New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He currently serves as Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on May 3, 2025)
Time Is Not What You Think It Is. Neither Are You.Welcome to a world where participants in psychology experiments respond to pictures they haven’t seen yet … where physicists influence the past behavior of a light beam by measuring its photons now … and where dreamers and writers literally remember their future. This landmark study explores the principles that allow the future to affect the present, and the present to affect the past, without causing paradox. It also deconstructs the powerful taboos that, for centuries, have kept mainstream science from taking phenomena like retrocausation and precognition seriously. We are four-dimensional creatures, and sometimes we are even caught in time loops—self-fulfilling prophecies where effects become their own causes.
Abrahamic religions worship a single God, which in most interpretations of Yahweh, God the Father, and Allah, is not believed to have a physical body. Though often referred to with gendered pronouns, many Abrahamic denominations use “divine gender” primarily as an analogy to better relate to the concept of God, with no sexual connotation. In Christian traditions with the concept of the Trinity, Jesus, who is male, is believed to be the physical manifestation of the pre-existentGod the Son.
Although the gender of God in Judaism is referred to in the Tanakh with masculine imagery and grammatical forms, traditional Jewish philosophy does not attribute the concept of sex to God.[a] At times, Jewish aggadic literature and Jewish mysticism do treat God as gendered. The ways in which God is gendered have also changed across time, with some modern Jewish thinkers viewing God as outside of the gender binary. Guillaume Postel (16th century), Michelangelo Lanci [it] (19th century), and Mark Sameth (21st century) theorize that the four letters of the personal name of God, YHWH, are a cryptogram which the priests of ancient Israel would have read in reverse as huhi, “heshe”, signifying a dual-gendered deity.[3][4][5][6]
God the Son (Jesus Christ), having been incarnated as a human man, is masculine. Classical western philosophy believes that God lacks a literal sex as it would be impossible for God to have a body (a prerequisite for sex).[9][10] However, Classical western philosophy states that God should be referred to (in most contexts) as masculine by analogy; the reason being God’s relationship with the world as begetter of the world and revelation (i.e. analogous to an active instead of receptive role in sexual intercourse).[11] Others interpret God as neither male nor female.[12][13]
The Catechism of the Catholic Church, Book 239, states that God is called “Father”, while his love for man may also be depicted as motherhood. However, God ultimately transcends the human concept of sex, and “is neither man nor woman: He is God.”[14][15]
In contrast to most Christian denominations, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) teaches that God the Father, God the Son, and the Holy Spirit are physically distinct while being one in purpose.[16][17] LDS Church members also believe that God the Father is married to a divine woman, referred to as “Heavenly Mother.”[18] Humans are considered to be spirit children of these heavenly parents.[19]
The New Testament refers to the Holy Spirit as masculine in a number of places, where the masculine Greek word “Paraclete” occurs, for “Comforter”, most clearly in the Gospel of John, chapters 14 to 16.[20] These texts were particularly significant when Christians were debating whether the New Testament teaches that the Holy Spirit is a fully divine person, or some kind of “force.” All major English Bible translations have retained the masculine pronoun for the Spirit, as in John 16:13, although it has been noted that in the original Greek, in some parts of John’s Gospel, the neuter Greek word pneuma is also used for the Spirit.[21]
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS) doctrine teaches that God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are three distinct and separate beings. In LDS teachings, God has a physical body, and thus is not only identified as being a man, but is physically male.[22] The same is for Jesus, but not for the Holy Spirit, which has a spiritual form.[22] God is also married to Heavenly Mother, who also has a physical body.[23]
Islam teaches that God (Allah) is beyond any comparison, transcendent, and thus God is beyond any gender attributes.[24] Arabic only possesses gendered pronouns (“he” and “she”) but does not have gender neutral pronouns (“it”), and “he” is typically used in cases where the subject’s gender is indeterminate. Thus, Allah is typically referred to as “He”, despite not having any gender attributes.[25]
The Baháʼí Faith
In the Baháʼí Faith, Baha’u’llah uses the Mother as an attribute of God: “He Who is well-grounded in all knowledge, He Who is the Mother, the Soul, the Secret, and the Essence”.[26] Baha’u’llah further writes that “Every single letter proceeding out of the mouth of God is indeed a Mother Letter, and every word uttered by Him Who is the Well Spring of Divine Revelation is a Mother Word, and His Tablet a Mother Tablet.”[27] The Primal Will of God is personified as the maid of heaven in the Baháʼí writings.
In Hinduism, there are diverse approaches to conceptualizing God and gender. Many Hindus focus upon impersonal Absolute (Brahman) which is genderless. Other Hindu traditions conceive God as androgynous (both female and male), alternatively as either male or female, while cherishing gender henotheism, that is without denying the existence of other Gods in either gender.[28][29]
The Shakti tradition conceives of God as a female. Other Bhakti traditions of Hinduism have both male and female gods. In ancient and medieval Indian mythology, each masculine deva of the Hindu pantheon is partnered with a feminine who is often a devi.[30]
The oldest of the Hindu scriptures is the Rigveda (2nd millennium BC). The first word of the Rigveda is the name Agni, the god of fire, to whom many of the vedic hymns are addressed, along with Indra the warrior. Agni and Indra are both male divinities.
The Rigveda refers to a creator (Hiranyagarbha or Prajapati), distinct from Agni and Indra. This creator is identified with Brahma (not to be confused with Brahman, the first cause), born of Vishnu’s navel, in later scriptures. Hiranyagarbha and Prajapati are male divinities, as is Brahma (who has a female consort, Saraswati).
Rigveda
There are many other gods in the Rigveda.[31] They are “not simple forces of nature,” and possess “complex character and their own mythology.”[31] They include goddesses of water (Āpaḥ) and dawn (Uṣas), and the complementary pairing of Father Heaven and Mother Earth.[31] However, they are all “subservient to the abstract, but active positive ‘force of truth’ [Ṛta]…which pervades the universe and all actions of the gods and humans.”[31] This force is sometimes mediated or represented by moral gods (the Āditya, e.g. Varuṇa) or even Indra.[31] The Āditya are male and Ṛta is personified as masculine in later scriptures (see also Dharma).
In some Hindu philosophical traditions, God is depersonalized as the quality-less Nirguna Brahman, the fundamental life force of the universe. However, theism itself is central to Hinduism.[32]
While many Hindus focus upon God in the neutral form,[citation needed]Brahman being of neuter gender grammatically, there are prominent Hindu traditions that conceive God as female, even as the source of the male form of God, such as the Shakta denomination. Hinduism, especially of the Samkhya school, views the creation of the cosmos as the result of the play of two radically distinct principles: the feminine matter (Prakṛti) and the masculine spirit (Purusha). Prakṛti is the primordial matter which is present before the cosmos becomes manifest. Prakṛti is seen as being “the power of nature, both animate and inanimate. As such, nature is seen as dynamic energy” (Rae, 1994). Prakriti is originally passive, immobile and pure potentiality by nature . Only through her contact with the kinetic Purusha she unfolds into the diverse forms before us. The idea of Prakṛti/Purusha leads to the concept of the Divine Consort. Almost every deva of the Hindu pantheon has a feminine consort (devi).[30]
The scripture of Sikhism is the Guru Granth Sahib. Printed as a heading for the Guru Granth, and for each of its major divisions, is the Mul Mantra, a short summary description of God, in Punjabi. Sikh tradition has it that this was originally composed by Guru Nanak (1469–1539), the founder of Sikhism.Punjabi: ੴ ਸਤਿ ਨਾਮੁ ਕਰਤਾ ਪੁਰਖੁ ਨਿਰਭਉ ਨਿਰਵੈਰੁ ਅਕਾਲ ਮੂਰਤਿ ਅਜੂਨੀ ਸੈਭੰ ਗੁਰ ਪ੍ਰਸਾਦਿ ॥ISO 15919: Ika ōaṅkāra sati nāmu karatā purakhu nirabha’u niravairu akāla mūrati ajūnī saibhaṃ gura prasādi.English: One Universal God, The Name Is Truth, The Creator, Fearless, Without Hatred, Image Of The Timeless One, Beyond Birth, Self-Existent, By Guru’s Grace.According to Sikhi, God has “No” Gender. Mool Mantar describes God as being “Ajuni” (lit. not in any incarnations) which implies that God is not bound to any physical forms. This concludes: the All-pervading Lord is Gender-less.[33]
Sunn mandal ik Yogi baiseh. Naar nuh purakhu kahahu kou kaiseh. Tribhavan joth raheh liv laaee. Suri nar naath sacheh saranaaee
The Yogi, the Primal Lord, sits in the Realm of Absolute Stillness (state free of mind’s wanderings or Phurne). (Since God) is neither male nor female; how can anyone describe Him? The three worlds center their attention on His Light. The godly beings and the Yogic masters seek the Sanctuary of this True Lord.
— SGGS. Ang 685
However, the Guru Granth Sahib consistently refers to God as “He” and “Father” (with some exceptions), typically because the Guru Granth Sahib was written in north Indian Indo-Aryan languages (mixture of Punjabi and Sant Bhasha, Sanskrit with influences of Persian) which have no neutral gender. English translations of the teachings may eliminate any gender specifications. From further insights into the Sikh philosophy, it can be deduced that God is, sometimes, referred to as the Husband to the Soul-brides, in order to make a patriarchal society understand what the relationship with God is like. Also, God is considered to be the Father, Mother, and Companion.[34]
Other
Unificationism
Unificationism views God, the Creator, as having dual characteristics of masculinity and femininity. Since an artist, like God, can only express that which is within the boundaries of their own nature, and according to Genesis 1:27, “So God created mankind in his own image, male and female he created them”, indicating that God’s image includes both male and female attributes.
Due to the more active role of masculinity, mankind typically portrays God as male, but the more receptive or supportive and nurturing role within God’s characteristics is less emphasized or even neglected or ignored in writings and in art.[35]
Animist religions
Animist religions are common among oral societies, many of which still exist in the 21st century. Typically, natural forces and shaman spiritual guides feature in these religions, rather than fully-fledged personal divinities with established personalities. It is in polytheism that such deities are found. Animist religions often, but not always, attribute gender to spirits considered to permeate the world and its events. Polytheistic religions, however, almost always attribute gender to their gods, though a few notable divinities are associated with various forms of epicene characteristics—gods that manifest alternatingly as male and female, gods with one male and one female “face”, and gods whose most distinctive characteristic is their unknown gender.[36]
Feminist spirituality
In her essay “Why Women Need the Goddess”, Carol P. Christ argues the notion of there having been an ancient religion of a supreme goddess.[37] The essay was first presented in the spring of 1978 as a keynote address for the “Great Goddess Re-emerging” conference at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Christ also co-edited the classic feminist religion anthologies Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality (1989) and Womanspirit Rising (1979/1989), the latter of which include her 1978 essay.
Medal of Elagabalus, Louvre Museum. Photo: PHGCOM / Wikimedia
A.Word.A.Daywith Anu Garg
heliogabalus
PRONUNCIATION:
(hee-lee-uh/oh-GAB-uh-luhs)
MEANING:
noun: A wildly extravagant, foolish, and self-indulgent person.
ETYMOLOGY:
After the Roman emperor Heliogabalus/Elagabalus (CE 204-222) who ruled 218-222 CE. Earliest documented use: 1589.
NOTES:
When it comes to imperial excess, Heliogabalus didn’t just raise the bar. He had it gilded, perfumed, and carried in procession. Crowned at 14 and assassinated by 18, he crammed a lifetime’s worth of scandal into four turbulent years. He married three women (and one man), held elaborate feasts where guests dined on fake food, and reportedly released wild animals into banquet halls, for ambiance, of course.
Fake hair? Yes. Makeup? Certainly. Dignity? Not so much.
The historian B.G. Niebuhr said that Heliogabalus had “nothing at all to make up for his vices, which are of such a kind that it is too disgusting even to allude to them.” And historian Adrian Goldsworthy was more blunt: “He was an incompetent, probably the least able emperor Rome ever had.”
Fifteen years ago, smack in the middle of Barack Obama‘s first term, amid the rapid rise of social media and a slow recovery from the Great Recession, a professor at the University of Connecticut issued a stark warning: the United States was heading into a decade of growing political instability.
It sounded somewhat contrarian at the time. The global economy was clawing back from the depths of the financial crisis, and the American political order still seemed anchored in post-Cold War optimism — though cracks were beginning to emerge, as evidenced by the Tea Party uprising. But Peter Turchin, an ecologist-turned-historian, had the data.
“Quantitative historical analysis reveals that complex human societies are affected by recurrent—and predictable—waves of political instability,” Turchin wrote in the journal Nature in 2010, forecasting a spike in unrest around 2020, driven by economic inequality, “elite overproduction” and rising public debt.
A protestor holds up a Mexican flag as burning cars line the street on June 08, 2025 in Los Angeles, California. Tensions in the city remain high after the Trump administration called in the National… More PHOTO BY MARIO TAMA/GETTY IMAGES
Now, with the nation consumed by polarization in the early months of a second Donald Trump presidency, institutional mistrust at all-time highs, and deepening political conflict, Turchin’s prediction appears to have landed with uncanny accuracy.
In the wake of escalating protests and the deployment of National Guard troops to Los Angeles under President Trump’s immigration crackdown, Turchin spoke with Newsweek about the latest escalation of political turbulence in the United States—and the deeper structural forces he believes have been driving the country toward systemic crisis for more than a decade.
Predicting Chaos
In his 2010 analysis published by Nature, Turchin identified several warning signs in the domestic electorate: stagnating wages, a growing wealth gap, a surplus of educated elites without corresponding elite jobs, and an accelerating fiscal deficit. All of these phenomena, he argued, had reached a turning point in the 1970s. “These seemingly disparate social indicators are actually related to each other dynamically,” he wrote at the time.
“Nearly every one of those indicators has intensified,” Turchin said in an interview with Newsweek, citing real wage stagnation, the effects of artificial intelligence on the professional class and increasingly unmanageable public finances.
Turchin’s prediction was based on a framework known as Structural-Demographic Theory (SDT), which models how historical forces—economic inequality, elite competition and state capacity—interact to drive cycles of political instability. These cycles have recurred across empires and republics, from ancient Rome to the Ottoman Empire.
Turchin’s forecast is based on a framework known as Structural-Demographic Theory (SDT), which models how historical forces—economic inequality, elite competition, and state capacity—interact to drive cycles of political instability. COURTESY PETER TURCHIN
“Structural-Demographic Theory enables us to analyze historical dynamics and apply that understanding to current trajectories,” Turchin said. “It’s not prophecy. It’s modeling feedback loops that repeat with alarming regularity.”
He argues that violence in the U.S. tends to repeat about every 50 years— pointing to spasms of unrest around 1870, 1920, 1970 and 2020. He links these periods to how generations tend to forget what came before. “After two generations, memories of upheaval fade, elites begin to reorganize systems in their favor, and the stress returns,” he said.
One of the clearest historical parallels to now, he notes, is the 1970s. That decade saw radical movements emerge from university campuses and middle-class enclaves not just in the U.S., but across the West. The far-left Weather Underground movement, which started as a campus organization at the University of Michigan, bombed government buildings and banks; the Red Army Faction in West Germany and Italy’s Red Brigades carried out kidnappings and assassinations. These weren’t movements of the dispossessed, but of the downwardly mobile—overeducated and politically alienated.
“There’s a real risk of that dynamic resurfacing,” Turchin said.
A ‘Knowledge Class’
Critics have sometimes questioned the deterministic tone of Turchin’s models. But he emphasizes that he does not predict exact events—only the risk factors and phases of systemic stress.
While many political analysts and historians point to Donald Trump’s 2016 election as the inflection point for the modern era of American political turmoil, Turchin had charted the warning signs years earlier — when Trump was known, above all, as the host of a popular NBC reality show.
President Donald Trump takes part in a signing ceremony after his inauguration on January 20, 2025 in the President’s Room at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC. MELINA MARA-POOL/GETTY IMAGES
“As you know, in 2010, based on historical patterns and quantitative indicators, I predicted a period of political instability in the United States beginning in the 2020s,” Turchin said to Newsweek. “The structural drivers behind this prediction were threefold: popular immiseration, elite overproduction, and a weakening state capacity.”
According to his model, Trump’s rise was not the cause of America’s political crisis but a symptom—emerging from a society already strained by widening inequality and elite saturation. In Turchin’s view, such figures often arise when a growing class of counter-elites—ambitious, credentialed individuals locked out of power—begin to challenge the status quo.
“Intraelite competition has increased even more, driven now mostly by the shrinking supply of positions for them,” he said. In 2025, he pointed to the impact of AI in the legal profession and recent government downsizing, such as the DOGE eliminating thousands of positions at USAID, as accelerants in this trend.
This theory was echoed by Wayne State University sociologist Jukka Savolainen, who argued in a recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal that the U.S. is risking the creation of a radicalized “knowledge class”—overeducated, underemployed, and institutionally excluded.
“When societies generate more elite aspirants than there are roles to fill, competition for status intensifies,” Savolainen wrote. “Ambitious but frustrated people grow disillusioned and radicalized. Rather than integrate into institutions, they seek to undermine them.”
Peter Turchin forecast a spike in unrest around 2020, driven by economic inequality, elite overproduction, and rising public debt. COURTESY OF PETER TURCHIN
Savolainen warned that Trump-era policies—such as the dismantling of D.E.I. and academic research programs and cuts to public institutions—have the potential to accelerate the pattern, echoing the unrest of the 1970s. “President Trump’s policies could intensify this dynamic,” he noted.
“Many are trained in critique, moral reasoning, and systems thinking—the very profile of earlier generations of radicals.”
Structural Drivers
Turchin, who is now an emeritus professor at UConn, believes the American system entered what he calls a “revolutionary situation”—a historical phase in which the destabilizing conditions can no longer be absorbed by institutional buffers.
Reflecting on the last few years in a recent post on his Cliodynamica newsletter, he wrote that “history accelerated” after 2020. He and colleague Andrey Korotayev had tracked rising incidents of anti-government demonstrations and violent riots across Western democracies in the lead-up to that year. Their findings predicted a reversal of prior declines in unrest.
“And then history accelerated,” he wrote. “America was slammed by the pandemic, George Floyd, and a long summer of discontent.”
A police officer points a hand cannon at protesters who have been detained pending arrest on South Washington Street in Minneapolis, May 31, 2020, as protests continued following the death of George Floyd. AP PHOTO/JOHN MINCHILLO, FILE
While many saw Trump’s 2020 election loss and the January 6 Capitol riot that followed as its own turning point in that hectic period, Turchin warned that these events did not mark an end to the turbulence.
“Many commentators hastily concluded that things would now go back to normal. I disagreed,” he wrote.
“The structural drivers for instability—the wealth pump, popular immiseration, and elite overproduction/conflict—were still running hot,” Turchin continued. “America was in a ‘revolutionary situation,’ which could be resolved by either developing into a full-blown revolution, or by being defused by skillful actions of the governing elites. Well, now we know which way it went.”
These stressors, he argues, are not isolated. They are systemwide pressures building for years, playing out in feedback loops. “Unfortunately,” he told Newsweek, “all these trends are only gaining power.”
LOS ANGELES—Triumphantly planting the pole firmly into the ground, U.S. Marines reportedly raised the American flag outside a cell phone store Thursday after defeating a group of skateboarding teenagers. “Victory!” cried out 1st Lt. Eric Mullaney, who wiped the sweat and grime from his brow and gazed up at the poignant sight of the billowing Stars and Stripes as it flew outside the small but strategic city strip mall. “It was a daunting five-minute battle, but we held our ground. May freedom ring over this Cricket Wireless! Semper fi!” At press time, sources reported that one of the Marines had tragically fallen in the line of duty after tripping over an electric scooter.
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Once a writer has a feeling of responsibility, as a human being, for the other human beings he influences, it seems to me he must become a humanist, and must feel himself as an instrument of change for good or for bad… an architect of the soul…
