Emotional Truth, Political Lies #4

Pain, Death, and Blood in the Streets: A Book Report

Working the Fracture Lines in US Political Culture

I’m digging into the dynamic underlying our dysfunction. This is story #4 in a series: Emotional Truth, Political Lies.

• IMHO, income inequality is our single biggest issue simply because it has paralyzed our ability to deal with everything else
• Worse, it is being systematically exploited for fun, profit, and political gain

Le massacre de la Saint-Barthélemy, Francois Dubois. Public Domain

Cohesion & Decohesion

Every once in a while, a book triggers a sea change in my thinking. If that change persists and deepens, the book makes it into my all-time Top 10.

I want to highlight a book that I consider critical to thinking about where we are economically and politically: Peter Turchin’s War and Peace and War (2006). It is supported by Thomas Pickety’s Captial in the Twenty-First Century (2014).

(I’m now reading Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell. It seems likely to make the list; I wanted to plug her book before moving on!)

Turchin posits a rhythm of social cohesion & ‘decohesion’ that grounds the formation and collapse of empires. He explores the dynamic in an…