seems to me that many revolutions are caused not by consistent suffering
The issue is not the level of suffering, the issue is what do you have to lose. What's the downside to burning the whole system to the ground? If not much, well, why not?
That is when people explode
Middle class doesn't explode. Arguably that's the reason why revolutions (and popular uprisings) in the West have become much more rare than, say, a couple of hundred years ago.
The issue is not the level of suffering, the issue is what do you have to lose.
More precisely, it is what you believe you have to lose. And humans seems to have a cognitive bias that they take all advantages of the current situation for granted, if they existed at least for a decade.
So when people see more options, they are going to be like: "Worst case, we fail and everything stays like it is now. Best case, everything improves. We just have to try." Then they sometimes get surprised, for example when millions of them starve to death, learnin...
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