An autocratic turn accelerates self-destructive collapse not because it is immoral, but because it forces a distributed system into a shape it cannot sustain. Short-term unity is purchased by suppressing variation, and the centre begins to confuse resistance with disobedience rather than information about system limits. Feedback from courts, states, agencies, markets, and elections is no longer read as corrective signal but as threat. Authority tightens in response, raising coherence locally while hollowing it out system-wide. What is striking is that this tightening does not merely encounter opposition; it becomes dependent on it. Like many extremist and fundamentalist movements, the coherence of the centre increasingly requires an adversary. Identity stabilises around opposition. Remove one object and another must be found. The system enters a high-gain loop in which decisiveness increases even as competence quietly drains away.
This dynamic is structural. Complex societies function through difference, delay, and partial autonomy. When those features are compressed, friction does not disappear. It multiplies. Institutions slow, hedge, resist, or fracture, not primarily out of ideology but because coordination has been over-constrained. Loyalty replaces competence. Bad news stops travelling upward. Decisions are increasingly generated from prior decisions rather than from reality. The system learns from itself. At scale, awareness thins. Language becomes performative. Social identity becomes something inhabited rather than examined. Reasons arrive after the fact. What looks like intention is often a rationalisation of momentum already underway. The drift into predictable ideological frames is less a matter of belief than of statistical pressure acting on communication, attention, and fear.
Civilisation is not a stable object. It is a continuous process of partial failure and provisional repair, with collapse always occurring somewhere while continuity is maintained elsewhere. What changes is not whether collapse happens, but its rate, distribution, and perceptibility. When trust, institutional capacity, and the ability of centres of authority to coordinate decay faster than institutions can reconstitute them, collapse ceases to be background noise and becomes the dominant signal. Failure, when it arrives under these conditions, is not gradual. Legitimacy, trust, and coordination across centres of authority erode unevenly until a boundary is crossed, after which reconfiguration propagates faster than anyone can manage. Tight coupling turns local breakage into system-wide shock. Suppressed variation returns as fracture; ignored error returns as crisis. This is why such movements are both aggressive and brittle. They depend on the difference they attempt to erase. The collapse is not moral judgment. It is the system exhausting its capacity to adapt, mistaking repetition for resolution, and calling that identity.
Daedelus Kite 