[ExI] Pew survey

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Mon, Jun 16, 2014 at 8:15 PM, Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
>
> PS.  The economic improvement would need to reach the bulk of the
> population.  More money to the upper 1% will not help.


### That didn't seem to be the case in historical bloodlettings. Usually,
revolutions happen when there is a fracture within the elite. The masses
matter only as cannon fodder. The French revolution didn't happen during
multiple famines until a bourgeoisie arose to challenge the aristocracy.
The Taiping rebellion started because there were too many unemployed
bureaucrats, not because the peasants wanted freedom. As the technology of
mass slaughter becomes ever less manpower-intensive, it will be trivially
easy to control the masses.

Rafal
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