Conflict

Conflict is not an aberration but a structural tension. It is woven into the fabric of social and economic life, a dynamic that is not merely tolerated but institutionalized. Markets thrive on competition, politics depends on opposition, education sorts by difference, and law enforcement revolves around an endless cycle of pursuit and evasion. The game of law and order is not designed to be won. What looks like design is the persistence of conflict itself, later retold as intention and mistaken for closure. Language performs this smoothing, translating emergence into the illusion of order, as though what endures must have been planned. Knowledge and science extend this distance, converting instability into abstraction that is itself unstable, where meaning is always displaced, always deferred, held at arm’s length.

What passes as stability is a balance built upon instability. Regulation, closure, and improvement are aspirational forms, but they can only exist against the backdrop of dissonance. The impossibility of resolution, the brokenness of systems, is the very condition of their continuity and the means by which they self-propagate. Stability is not the elimination of conflict but the patterned endurance of it—metastability as the operative state. We are not beings who inhabit systems of trouble to be fixed; we are beings constituted by trouble, sustained by the impossibility of its resolution. To live in such a world is to inhabit problematised reality itself, where the expectation of conflict is not failure but the grammar of existence.