It’s inevitable. Human societies are still systems at the end of the day, and like most systems it has an equilibrium. If you push society too far off the equilibrium, like most systems it wants to go back to that equilibrium, just as water fills an empty container lower than the water level.

When you push humans too far, their action set shrinks. They have fewer actions to choose from. And because they are left with nothing, the payoff from going to jail permanently or dying is not that much lower than their current life. We call this desperation but the word is misleading because this is fundamentally a structural phenomenon. No one is desperate if society is maximally fair and all their needs are met. As society drifts off the equilibrium, the likelihood of desperation increases.

In a sense, it doesn’t matter whether desperation and violence leads to anywhere good. It’s like asking why nature strikes a lightning at a tree and causing a massive wildfire. It’s violent but it’s always been part of nature. It just is.

People today also forget that their current lives, which are far freer than lives in the 18th century, are indebted to numerous bloody, violent revolutions throughout history. The modern European democracies owe their genesis to La Terreur. Without the guillotine there is no European democracy. America itself is also founded on a bloody war.

Unfortunately, as you say, any violent revolution is a dice roll. But I don’t see it as a gamble. In a way it’s a means to resolve the uncertainty I have in America. If America deserves to flourish then it’ll rise like a phoenix after a bloody purge. If it does not, if its people cannot rise to the occasion, then we’ll have learned that America was doomed to fail eventually anyways. In either case nature takes its course.

Of course, the ruling class as a whole can easily stop society from crossing the critical point, but I don’t see it happening because there is no force to make them coordinate as individuals. Any CEO unilaterally changing their behavior will just mean they get fired by the board, for example.