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Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography

Reading about free software specifically and free culture in general causes a dangerous uptick in my idealism index. Idealism in the sense of hoping and even believing that we can all get along. (Somehow. Someday.) That we can help each other. I think I had a healthy share of idealism growing up but gradually over the years I’ve addressed this vulnerability by developing an outer shell of jaded cynicism. It’s much more comforting to have no hope than to have hopes that can be crushed. However, there is a good chance with this strategy that your heart will shrink a couple of sizes.

But then I read essays by Richard Stallman, listen to speeches by Eben Moglen, and read and listen to many other hopeful voices, and I start to see something better. Like Fox Mulder, I want to believe. Which of course is dangerous. You leave yourself open to ridicule if you believe. You might be dismissed as being naive. To which of course we should say, “So what?” I want to believe that we can do better.

The great moral question of the twenty-first century is: If all knowledge, all culture, all art, all useful information, can be costlessly given to everyone at the same price that it is given to anyone — if everyone can have everything, everywhere, all the time, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone from anything? If you could make lamb chops in endless numbers by the mere pressing of a button, there would be no moral argument for hunger ever, anywhere. I see no system of moral philosophy generated by the economy of the past that could evolve a principle to explain the moral legitimacy of denial in the presence of infinite profusion.

Most think that phenomena such as political instability should be understood by constructing detailed narratives of what actually happened — always looking for patterns and regularities, but never forgetting that each outbreak emerged from a particular time and place. “We're doing what can be done, as opposed to aspiring after what can't,” says Daniel Szechi, who studies early-modern history at the University of Manchester, UK. “We're just too ignorant” to identify meaningful cycles, he adds.

Goldstone has searched for cliodynamic patterns in past revolutions, and predicts that Egypt will face a few more years of struggle between radicals and moderates and 5–10 years of institution-building before it can regain stability. “It is possible but rare for revolutions to resolve rapidly,” he says. “Average time to build a new state is around a dozen years, and many take longer.”

it seems that indicators of corruption increase and political cooperation unravels when a period of instability or violence is imminent.

they call the secular cycle, extends over two to three centuries. It starts with a relatively egalitarian society, in which supply and demand for labour roughly balance out. In time, the population grows, labour supply outstrips demand, elites form and the living standards of the poorest fall. At a certain point, the society becomes top-heavy with elites, who start fighting for power. Political instability ensues and leads to collapse, and the cycle begins again.

What is different is the scale — Turchin and his colleagues are systematically collecting historical data that span centuries or even millennia — and the mathematical analysis of how the variables interact.

when it comes to predicting unique events such as the Industrial Revolution, or the biography of a specific individual such as Benjamin Franklin, he says, the conventional historian's approach of assembling a narrative based on evidence is still best.

“You certainly can't predict when a plane is going to crash, but engineers recover the black box. They study it carefully, they find out why the plane crashed, and that's why so many fewer planes crash today than used to.”

“We can tell you in great detail what the grain prices were in a few towns in southern England in the Middle Ages,” he says. “But we can't tell you how most ordinary people lived their lives.”

Turchin's approach by throwing light on the immediate triggers of political violence. He argues3, for example, that for such violence to happen, individuals must begin to identify strongly with a political group. One powerful way for groups to cement that identification is through rituals, especially frightening, painful or otherwise emotional ones that create a body of vivid, shared memories. “People form the impression that the most profound insights they have into their own personal history are shared by other people,”

Elites have been known to give power back to the majority, he says, but only under duress, to help restore order after a period of turmoil. “I'm not afraid of uprisings,” he says. “That's why we are where we are.”