Unfinished Systems

Large systems of power, regulation, ideology, and identity do not stabilise by winning or resolving the problems they address. They stabilise by remaining unfinished. Political institutions, security apparatuses, markets, cultural movements, and ideological projects sustain themselves by managing problems they cannot conclusively solve: inequality, threat, disorder, legitimacy, desire, dissent. Total control would terminate their function. Total victory would remove their justification. Instead, these systems organise around partial containment, managed failure, and perpetual insufficiency. This generates ongoing work, budgets, authority, narratives, and relevance. The inability to fully resolve conflict is not a flaw in these systems. It is the condition that keeps them operational.

Philosophically, this is the ideological orbit. Meaning, power, and identity persist because they circulate around unresolved differences rather than eliminating them. The system requires something external to pursue, regulate, fear, correct, or oppose, or it collapses into redundancy. This is why peace imagined as final resolution feels absurd: it would dissolve the structures that currently give coherence to political, economic, and cultural life. But none of this is essential or eternal. It describes a phase of relational organisation, not a law of existence. Fields reorganise. Orbits decay. New structures emerge that redistribute tension differently. This will happen regardless of intention. The only open question is whether such transformation occurs through adaptation or through collapse, with or without us present to experience the difference.