Attempts to stabilise volatile systems by force tend to amplify and exacerbate the volatility they were intended to contain. Sons of Anarchy staged this in miniature: each shortcut, retaliation, or opportunistic scheme deepened the instability that provoked it. The club kept solving yesterday’s damage with tomorrow’s disaster because the logic driving their decisions never changed. Their actions accumulated — a running tally of escalating mistakes — each one adding to a total they could never pay down.
The current US administration is caught in the same arithmetic. An obsessive drive for order, control, and symbolic dominance produces the opposite effect: each intervention adds new instability to the ledger. Policy becomes a kind of pathological bookkeeping where every “decisive” action is just another entry worsening the balance sheet. What looks like strength is a compulsion, and what looks like strategy is the repetition of a loop that compounds its own risks.
Psychologically, this takes the form of projection. A system that cannot acknowledge its role in generating crises assigns blame outward, manufacturing enemies to explain problems it has authored. Sons of Anarchy did this with imagined threats and heroic self-justification; a government does it with nationalism, culture wars, and foreign antagonism. Certainty replaces insight. The feedback loop tightens. The sum grows.
And in a saturated, interconnected world, none of this cost can be offloaded. There is nowhere opaque to bury the externalities. Every attempt to impose order rebounds as disorder across the entire field — economic, social, ecological, diplomatic. The total grows because the logic generating it remains untouched. These are the sums of anarchy: a system adding to its own instability, convinced that more of the same will somehow settle the account.
Daedelus Kite 