Elite over production is a concept invented by Peter Turchin, a Russian born academic, which argues that social unrest is often caused by too many potential elite members for the number of elite positions. These extra potential elites are under-employed and thus gravitate to things like radical politics. Over time, these excess elites chip away at the social order and eventually the order begins to falter. He claims that crises throughout history were due to the overproduction of elites.

It is an elegant theory, in that it is simple, not necessarily beautiful. It also seems to explain the present crisis in the West. Look around at any large corporation or government facility and you will see lots of credentials. Look around the local coffee shop and you can see many of the same credentials. America has far too many people with advanced degrees than it needs. Look around at radical politics and it seems to confirm that too many elites leads to trouble.

There are several counter arguments to this claim. The first is that our elite appears to be getting dumber. We assume that intelligence correlates with social status and in a healthy society it should, but we have a lot of insanely stupid people in positions of authority and influence. If the insane and stupid are occupying elite positions, then it suggests the excess elites are even more insane and stupid. A few hours on social media seems to confirm this observation.

This conforms with the observation that humans are getting dumber, and the process may be accelerating. Again, anecdotes abound. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, is struggling to get a rocket to the moon, a feat accomplished by men half a century ago using materials from their garage. The Concorde achieved supersonic speeds as a passenger-carrying plane last century. We now struggle to keep the slow airplanes in the air and from smashing into one another.

Another counter to the Turchin theory is that what he terms an overproduction of elites is what fuels the dynamism of the West. Those extra elites may go off into radical politics, but they also go off to invent new stuff. The computer revolution was driven in large by people excluded from the elite. As the elite becomes more exclusive, the smart and capable form their own elite outside the system. In time, they are able to challenge the old elite and even replace it.

Then there is the issue of how one defines elite. Elizabeth Warren, for example, is as dumb as a goldfish, but she is in the Senate, which classifies her as elite. John Fetterman, a man unable to communicate with his fellow humans, was just released from a lunatic asylum into the Senate. Even before his trip to the asylum, he had never held a job, but he qualifies as an elite. When your elite contains brain damaged lunatics you have to rethink how you define elite.

As Ed Dutton has shown, many of the people who circulate inside and just outside our elites are people with deleterious genetic mutations. In lean times, these people are excluded from elite society, often excluded from society as a whole, because they pose a risk to the fragile order. In times of plenty, they are tolerated and therefore proliferate over time until they reach critical mass. These people spend their days on social media bombarding the normals with their madness.

Of course, all of these observations can be right. We may be producing too many potential elite members, while at the same time the elite becomes increasingly deranged, owing to the proliferation of spiteful mutants. Selection shifts from the willingness and ability to compete with the best to the willingness and ability to navigate a world populated with spiteful mutants. This would explain why it feels like our elites have gone mad all of a sudden.

Another factor is the commodification of elite perception. A century ago, it was rare to encounter someone with an advanced degree. Most Americans could live their life never having met a college professor. College degrees were rare, and many people never finished high school. Today, everyone is expected to finish high school and then attend college. Even advanced degrees are becoming common. Most college sports coaches now have a graduate degree.

In other words, a marker for elite status has been turned into a commodity that has value only to the diploma mills selling them. This is obvious when you look into the people promoting social causes. You see lots of credentialed lunatics. By lowering the barrier of entry to college, the system has been flooded with the mentally unstable, who ultimately fall into areas that promise to provide clarity and structure. Political causes are a form of self-medication only found on campus.

Then you have the fact that the material difference between most people who see themselves as the elite and the rest of society is quite small. A century ago, a Senator was a rich person who lived a life that was clearly different from the average person, not just materially by socially. Rich people went on holiday and had hobbies, while the average person had to work and spent what little time off they had doing inexpensive local things with friends and family.

Today, people on welfare go on vacation. If you are Elizabeth Warren, it must seem outrageous that Spirit Airlines exists at all. She is a member of the world’s most exclusive political club and she spends time every day begging for money, often having to fly commercial to do it. The psychological impact of this narrow gap in standards of living between the elites and the rest leads to some of the craziness. They have to have some way to signal their elite status.

This commodification of elite markers, things like education and display items, is made possible by the credit economy. The proliferation of highly credential public nuisances is only possible because of the student loan system. Remove this from the equation and half of the colleges go bankrupt in a month. The surviving colleges contract dramatically in order to remain solvent. The college diploma quickly goes back to being a symbol of privilege or unusual individual talent and commitment.

The same can be said for the material side of things. The reason that the middle-manager and his wife can live in a McMansion in a new suburb is the flow of cheap money into the housing markets. When every man can live like a king, every man begins to see himself as a king. Before long he is taking hormones and demanding you call him a queen. This is where elite over production comes back into focus. Cheap money produces an excess of people who think they are special.

All of these explanations for the present madness are interesting and they seem to hold up under scrutiny. The cafeteria of social decline offers something for everyone, so you can indulge yourself according to your inclination. In the end, it may be that Spengler was right to think of civilization as an organism. It has a life cycle. The American empire has reached its old age and therefore is riddled with many of the maladies that eventually kill off a civilization.

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