The Unsustainable States of America

Authoritarian consolidation does not appear out of nowhere; it emerges as a systemic reconfiguration under stress. In the American case, its acceleration is not an anomaly but the result of institutional brittleness, economic concentration, and communicative distortion. What distinguishes the current dynamic is its self-amplifying character: once initiated, it builds on itself, hollowing democratic resilience while consuming the very foundations that made it possible. Crucially, its momentum depends on what it negates. By suppressing pluralism, innovation, and cultural diversity, it undermines the base of prosperity and power on which it rests.

From Context-Sensitive Governance to Extraction-Driven Control

Democratic systems function as dissipative structures: slow, plural, and self-correcting through contestation. This friction prevents capture by concentrated power. When these mechanisms erode—through corporate lobbying, deregulation, and technological acceleration—governance shifts into extraction-driven control. Feedback channels designed for accountability turn into feedforward conduits, amplifying disinformation and narrowing permissible discourse (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018). The system begins to function less as a field of deliberation and more as a compression filter, accelerating fragility.

Structural Vulnerability and Brittleness

American prosperity was never purely market-driven; it relied on democratic scaffolding. Institutions diffused risks, absorbed shocks, and maintained variety. W. Ross Ashby’s principle of requisite variety (1956) shows why: only systems with sufficient diversity of responses can remain stable against disruption. Remove those scaffolds, and economic dynamism becomes self-cannibalising: innovation turns from recombination into predation, suppressing the diversity required for systemic stability (Streeck, 2016). Authoritarian tightening thus arises not as an external force but as capitalism without context — the stripping away of redundancy and difference in favour of brittle uniformity.

Escalation and Phase Transition

Each turn toward centralisation diminishes the system’s capacity to resist the next. This produces a positive feedback loop: once variety is stripped away, the collapse accelerates. Stafford Beer’s cybernetic insight (1979) is relevant here: viable systems depend on recursive layers of feedback to absorb complexity. Strip those layers away and the system locks into brittle over-simplification. The result is a phase transition, moving toward a single-state attractor. What appears efficient — military officials acquiescent, dissenting voices silenced, media unified — is actually idempotence: every pathway producing the same result, resilience replaced with sameness.

Language, Communication, and Entropy

The consolidation of control is enacted not only in institutions but in language. Discourse is reduced from a field of contested meaning to a one-way transmission, where entropy is “managed” by eliminating difference. In attention-driven economies, ignorance is not absence but production — a surplus commodity that sustains confusion (Arendt, 1951). Communication becomes a feedforward cascade in which emotional resonance outweighs coherence, leaving populations unable to coordinate resistance. Diversity of thought, the system’s hidden stabiliser, is steadily erased.

Unsustainability and Self-Consumption

This trajectory cannot stabilise. Its power is momentum; its weakness is dependence on momentum. By suppressing diversity — cultural, intellectual, economic — it consumes the substrate that sustains it. America’s astonishing wealth and dynamism came from pluralism, redundancy, and distributed resilience. Without these, authoritarian tightening erodes its own base. What looks like consolidation is actually self-termination: prosperity collapses because it cannot be sustained without friction, and the logic of control devours itself.

Conclusion

The paradox is stark: consolidation advances by dismantling the very conditions that make it viable. It erodes error-correction, replacing resilience with brittle feedforward loops. In systemic terms, this is a forced phase transition into a transient state — strong in appearance, weak in structure. The trajectory is not indefinite consolidation but collapse, a terminal process whose costs will be borne by those trapped within as the system consumes its own foundations.

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References

• Arendt, H. (1951). The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt.
• Ashby, W. R. (1956). An Introduction to Cybernetics. London: Chapman & Hall.
• Beer, S. (1979). The Heart of Enterprise. Chichester: Wiley.
• Levitsky, S., & Ziblatt, D. (2018). How Democracies Die. New York: Crown.
• Streeck, W. (2016). How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System. London: Verso.