Peace is not merely difficult. We have built institutions, identities, economies and languages whose coherence depends upon the persistence of conflict.
Tag: systems thinking
A civilisation builds systems to solve its problems, then discovers that the systems have become the problems, while its dependence upon them has made their continuity deeply problematic.
Institutions study the world remarkably well. The harder problem is that the world they are studying is also inside the building, and there is no position outside the system from which that entanglement simply disappears.
A nation cannot be unified by dividing a people against themselves. The danger begins when that contradiction becomes a political method.
Technocratic complexity and populist caricature are parts of the same feedback loop. Each produces the conditions that sustain the other.
Civilisations persist by continually reorganising themselves. The unanswered question is whether conflict, crisis and systemic collapse/renewal remain the principal means through which that persistence is achieved.
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redesigning the global economy
The greatest trick concentrated capitalism ever pulled was convincing the world that its own most destructive tendencies belonged exclusively to communism.
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the same problem
The most important pattern in modern society is the one almost nobody is looking for.
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how capitalism reconstructs scarcity
The institutions assigned to solve our deepest problems are sustained by these, the very relations they are unable and/or unwilling to question.
A system cannot sustainably maximise accessibility and scarcity at the same time.
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outer limits: impredicativity
Every explanation of reality becomes another part of the reality left to explain:
E(R) ∈ R → E(R) ≠ R.
The result is a civilisation increasingly confronted by novel problems, yet repeatedly encouraged to admire the elegance with which it preserves the assumptions that produced them.
Daedelus Kite 