Bourgeois Overproduction and the Problem of the Fake Elite

New Discourses

Education

4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 20 May 2021

⏱️ 70 minutes

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Summary

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 36 Elite overproduction is a concept that was forwarded by the anthropologist Peter Turchin to attempt to explain some part of why we face growing social instability in today's society. This is an insightful concept that deserves serious consideration in our present circumstances. It is characterized by a society engaging in practices, like sending too many people to college or for advanced degrees, that create conditions for potential elites to end up underemployed and underaccomplished in the existing socioeconomic power structure of society, and it breeds resentment in this class of people. Indeed, it generates a bourgeoisie, which in turn generates social instability due to the overproliferation of their values and, eventually, ressentiment. In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, James Lindsay walks through the idea of elite overproduction to focus in on the operant problem that it leads to, bourgeois overproduction, and posits that this problem is the seat of the Woke menace and many of the large-scale ills that have arisen in similar form over the past few centuries in prosperous societies. He also discusses the ways in which the Marxian characterization of the bourgeoisie was imprecise in a way that led to identifying something akin to this problem while misdiagnosing its true foundations (or his own role in it). Join him for a detailed discussion of this phenomenon. Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com/support patreon.com/newdiscourses subscribestar.com/newdiscourses youtube.com/channel/UC9K5PLkj0N_b9JTPdSRwPkg/join Website: newdiscourses.com Follow: facebook.com/newdiscourses twitter.com/NewDiscourses instagram.com/newdiscourses https://newdiscourses.locals.com pinterest.com/newdiscourses linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses Podcast: @newdiscourses podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-…es/id1499880546 bit.ly/NDGooglePodcasts open.spotify.com/show/0HfzDaXI5L4LnJQStFWgZp stitcher.com/podcast/new-discourses © 2021 New Discourses. All rights reserved.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everybody, I'm James Lindsay, you are listening to the new Discourses podcast.
0:25.4	I want to talk about the problem.
0:27.5	The problem.
0:28.5	Not maybe it's not the problem, it's kind of a heart of the problem though.
0:31.8	I want to talk about the idea, I actually want to develop and kind of modify an idea, put
0:36.9	forth by Peter Turchin, the idea of elite overproduction.
0:40.4	I've talked about this some before, a lot of people ask me if I've been reading Turchin,
0:44.7	I need to read Turchin in more detail, I've only kind of personally glanced at him in
0:49.2	the last little while because I don't really want to, this is actually kind of a window
0:54.0	into how I think I tend to do my own thing first and then go back and then read where
0:58.2	other people say after.
1:00.4	And so, I've had this thought about elite overproduction, I've been thinking about elite over
1:05.0	production for a number of years but in various contexts but particularly I've been thinking
1:11.3	about it in the context of the woke problem at least very vigorously for, I don't know,
1:16.5	at least a year and a half.
1:17.5	I remember having conversations in late 2018 with Mike Naina about it, maybe earlier than
1:24.4	that, it's hard to date, I kind of know when I first recognized it was actually when
1:31.5	I was in graduate school, I didn't know I had a name.
1:34.6	I just knew that there were a lot of people in grad school who had no business being there.
1:39.4	I often, with my, you know, a little bit of imposter syndrome I had going on there, often
1:44.2	wondered if I was one myself, perhaps I was.
1:48.0	I named that problem at the time after a character in my graduate school program who I won't
	...

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