Indeterminacy: Metastable Humanity

Belief systems—political, spiritual, cultural—do not cohere because they achieve certainty. They cohere because they cannot. The very fact that their claims are indeterminate and unprovable generates the turbulence that binds them together. What looks like a contest over truth is, in effect, the medium of systemic persistence. Institutions, rituals, and governing frameworks stabilise themselves by carrying forward unresolved contradiction, ensuring that communication remains recursive and culturally reproducible. Continuity is sustained not by eliminating friction but by metabolising it.

The European Wars of Religion illustrate this dynamic with precision. Protestants and Catholics could not resolve their disputes because the metaphysical ground of each position was beyond proof. Instead, their oscillating conflicts became the substrate upon which modern Europe was built. States did not emerge by settling questions of truth but by institutionalising the turbulence into boundaries, treaties, and the Westphalian system. Insecurity itself was generative, producing a new order out of cycles of contradiction.

Today the same principle operates on a global scale. The international system is driven less by convergent truth than by unresolved claims of national destiny, cultural identity, or ideological necessity. Rival powers metabolise conflict, feeding it back into the structures of diplomacy, military posture, and economic competition. Far from being aberrations, insecurity and indeterminacy are the binding agents that keep the system active.

The insight is unsettling: stability is not the absence of contradiction but its recursive circulation. Political and cultural life persists not in spite of unresolved turbulence but because of it. To imagine a world without insecurity is to imagine a world without continuity, for it is the perpetual oscillation around the unprovable that sustains collective existence.