The CEO earns your annual salary before your first coffee of the year.

Imagine a talented young lawyer in 1785, in a small provincial town. He has brilliant Jesuit-college studies behind him. But every door is closed by the nobility. To become an army officer: four generations of nobility required. To enter the Court: impossible.

His name is Maximilien Robespierre. His intelligence boils. He rages in silence. And he is not alone.

Thousands of brilliant young men — Danton, Marat, Saint-Just, Camille Desmoulins — share the same frustration. The system trained them. The system rejects them.

In 14 years, this mass of placeless elites seizes power and executes the old aristocracy. The guillotine becomes the symbol of this deadly competition between old and new elites. A society tips into the Terror.

Rome, 2nd century BC. Too many ambitious young men. Too many senators. Too many generals. Too many knights wanting their share. Marius. Sulla. Pompey. Caesar. Each with his army, his clients, his limitless ambitions.

The Roman Republic, which had held for 450 years, can no longer hold under the weight of its own surplus elites. Civil wars. Proscriptions. Political assassinations. Blood runs in the streets of Rome.

In 49 BC, Caesar crosses the Rubicon. The Republic technically dies that day. The Empire is born in violence — and will hold 500 years, but in authoritarian form.

Turchin's lesson: the Republic dies from an excess of Republicans. Too many Brutuses, not enough consulships.

Imagine a 28-year-old American graduate with $80,000 in student debt, a Yale or Stanford master's, serving coffee at Starbucks. There are millions of them.

They aren't poor in the classical sense. They are downwardly mobile. The system had promised them the top. The system forgot them. Their anger is articulate, targeted, mobilizable.

On one side, they create the Trump movement (right-wing counter-elite). On the other, academic wokeism (left-wing counter-elite). Both fight the established elites — and each other.

Extreme polarization. Capitol 2021. Assassination attempt 2024. Turchin published his prediction in 2010: "major political instability in the United States around 2020." No one had listened. He was right.

Picture an average French citizen, educated, hard-working. He lives in the periphery, drives a car because he has no choice, pays his taxes. He watches Emmanuel Macron and his Parisian friends grow rich. Something snaps.

A carbon tax on diesel — a "rational" measure according to the elites. But it's the drop that overflows the glass.

November 2018: roundabouts occupied across France. 300,000 Yellow Vests in the streets on the first Saturday. Not an organized revolution — a spontaneous explosion of peripheral France.

Since then, chronic instability. Three Prime Ministers in 2024. No majority. Aspirant overproduction (young graduates without prospects) + popular frustration = lasting ungovernability.