Is a Violent Upheaval Coming to the US?

Will the US Really Experience a Violent Upheaval in 2020?

By Natalie Wolchover | LiveScience.com
The Moral of this video is trouble IS coming... Get out of the cities, live sustainably, live in community and don't be a part of the unrest - Also don't be a victim of it. IT IS COMING!


Circa 1870, the North fought the South in the Civil War. Half a century
later, around 1920, worker unrest, racial tensions and anti-Communist
sentiment caused another nationwide upsurge of violence. Then, 50 years
later, the Vietnam War and Civil Rights Movement
triggered a third peak in violent political, social and racial
conflict. Fifty years after that will be 2020. If history continues to
repeat itself, we can expect a violent upheaval in the United States in a
few years.

It sounds like pseudoscience, but it's a published theory. "My model
suggests that the next [peak in violence] will be worse than the one in
1970 because demographic variables such as wages, standards of living
and a number of measures of intra-elite confrontation are all much worse
this time," said Peter Turchin, an ecologist, evolutionary biologist and mathematician at the University of Connecticut.

Turchin has led the development of a field of study called
"cliodynamics," in which scientists attempt to find meaningful patterns
in history. The endeavor flies in the face of the traditional study of
history, which assumes the countless variables interacting within a
society lead to chaotic fluctuations in outcomes like violence and
social unrest. Massimo Pigliucci,
a philosopher of science at CUNY-Lehman College, said most historians
believe that "the factors at play are so many and so variable that there
is little reason to expect quasi-regular cycles, or a unified theory to
explain them."

But Turchin argues there is order in the chaos after all.

In the new study, Turchin, who reported his results in the July issue
of the Journal of Peace Research, compiled historical data about violent
incidents in U.S. history between 1780 and 2010, including riots, terrorism, assassinations and rampages. The data indicates that a cycle of violence
repeats itself every 50 years in America, like a wave that peaks in
every other generation. This short-term cycle is superimposed over
another, longer-term oscillation that repeats every 200 to 300 years.
The slower waves in violence can either augment or suppress the 50-year
peaks, depending on how the two cycles overlap.

The longer cycle is "the one which we understand much better, and it is a universal feature of all complex societies," Turchin
told Life's Little Mysteries. From the Roman Empire to medieval France
to ancient China, scholars have noted that societies swing between
100-150 years of relative peace and 100-150 years of conflict, and then
back again. Only some societies exhibit the shorter-term, and less
subtle, 50-year-long cycles of violence along the way — the Roman
Empire, for one, and if Turchin's theory is correct, the United States
as well.

Why 50-year cycles? Turchin explained that a surge of violence begins
in the same way as a forest fire: explosively. After a period of
escalation followed by sustained violence, citizens begin to "yearn for
the return of stability and an end to fighting," he wrote in his paper.
The prevailing social mood swings toward stifling the violence at all
costs, and those who directly experienced the civil violence maintain the peace for about a human generation — 20 or 30 years. But the stability doesn't last.

Eventually, "the conflict-scarred generation dies off or retires, and a new cohort arises, people who did not experience the horrors of civil war
and are not immunized against it. If the long-term social forces that
brought about the first outbreak of internal hostilities are still
operating, then the society will slide into the second civil war," he
wrote. "As a result, periods of intense conflict tend to recur with a
period of roughly two generations (40–60 years)."

Peaks occurred around 1870, 1920 and 1970. Confounding this pattern,
there was no peak of U.S. violence in the 1820s. In fact, historians
call it the "era of good feelings." Turchin explained that social
variables such as wages and employment were "really excellent at that
time, so there was no reason for any violence to get going." The cycle
was skipped.

But we might not be so lucky this time around. If Turchin's model is
right, then the current polarization and inequality in American society
will come to a head in 2020. "After the last eight years or so, notice
how the discourse in our political class has become fragmented. It's
really unprecedented for the last 100 years. So basically by all
measures, there are social pressures for instability that are much worse
than 50 years ago."

Pigliucci, who writes a well-known blog on pseudoscience and skeptical
thinking, says that although he believes Turchin is "moving in the right
direction" by applying mathematical models to history, in this case he
might be seeing patterns in random data. Violence and other forms of
social unrest undoubtedly vary over time within any give society,
Pigliucci said, but most historians would say these fluctuations are
random.

Pigliucci isn't convinced that the 50-year cycle of violence Turchin
has identified in U.S. history reflects more than just a random
fluctuation. "The database is too short: the entire study covers the
period 1780-2010, a mere 230 years," Pigliucci wrote in an email. "You
can fit at most four 50-year peaks and two secular ones. I just don't
see how one could reasonably exclude that the observed pattern is
random. But of course we would have to wait a lot longer to collect new
data and find out."

Only time will tell if the cycle of U.S. violence holds true, and
another telltale peak — or lack thereof — is only a few years away.