Democracy Blues

Political systems orbit themselves—never whole, never closed. They produce local alignments: shared language, policy, identity, but only by scattering unresolved tension across their surface. The more tightly coherence is asserted in one region, the more distortion accumulates elsewhere. Boundaries harden, but meaning seeps through; authority centralises, but contradiction diffuses along the edges. Every declaration of unity embeds fractures the system cannot escape. Stability, such as it is, rides on this asymmetry—the refusal to seal the manifold flat. The system survives by circling its own incompleteness.