Politics is frustrating. It’s tempting to blame the stupidity, corruption, or weakness of people, and sometimes that’s correct. But even if genuinely well-intentioned people were in charge—
Even if our institutions were thoughtfully designed—
Even when progress is real—
Politics still sucks. And it always has.
When something persists across radically different times, cultures, and belief systems, it’s not an accident. There’s a reason.
It changes in ways that cannot be reliably predicted, yet decisions must still be made in real time. Rules must operate not only under present conditions, but under conditions that do not yet exist.
If there is a complete, eternal rule set that accurately and effectively anticipates all future states of the world, we do not know it. Which means any rules we create must be revisable.
Humans are not inert matter waiting to be acted upon by authority. They are self-regulating systems that continuously generate activity, adjustment, and correction simply by remaining alive. They do this spontaneously, whether authority approves or not.
This is not an appeal to freedom. It is a descriptive claim. Humans act. We think and believe. Denying this is equivalent to denying skin.
If that seems controversial, see the footnote on homeostasis.1
People who think and act autonomously will want and believe different things, especially as circumstances change. This is true even among honest, well-intentioned people acting in good faith.
Once multiple such agents share space, conflict is not optional. It is emergent.
That conflict must be managed—by people who always disagree, under conditions they cannot control, using protocols that must continue to function as those conditions change—or else it will devolve to violence.
All of that may seem simple—and it is—but importantly, if it’s true, we can actually derive the minimum rule set required for any political system to avoid collapse into violence.
The world is uncertain.
This is obvious.People think and act autonomously.
This is inescapable.Autonomous action creates conflict.
This is true whether authority acknowledges it or not.To mitigate conflict, co-inhabitants of any shared space must coordinate behavior, resolve disputes, and enforce agreements.
This is a polity.Any coordination system requires rules to function.
These rules:
Must be publicly knowable.
This includes, without exception, all rules for making rules.Must not exclude any person or group subject to them.
Rules may govern entry or participation but may not define any person or group subject to the rules of the polity as non-citizens or second-class citizens.Must not forbid internal, non-violent means of expressing, contesting, and revising disagreement.
Must not be permanent or exempt from future cancellation or revision with the sole exception of this minimum set.
When people encounter a political outlook different than their own, they usually say something like “That’s immoral!” What follows is a fight over values—justice, rights, equality, freedom, tradition.
Those arguments can matter, and sometimes do, but only rarely because people will always think for themselves. People of different temperaments and backgrounds tend not to converge on the same vision of “the perfect society.”
The framework enumerated above is both simpler and more robust than theories that ground legitimacy in moral abstraction (however real some morals might be). Rather than wrestle with hypotheticals, this framework simply says:
A political system is legitimate to the extent it makes human flourishing possible over time.
Of course, in addition to those other things, we also don’t agree what “flourishing” means in any given situation. Even if we did, it would change as conditions change.
What doesn’t change is this:
Violence, repression, and premature death make human flourishing impossible, regardless of how you define it.
In other words, we’ll never agree on what the good life is. But there is widespread agreement on what it is not.
Legitimacy is a function of how much any system lets people argue about and experiment with what the good life should be in the context of their own shared circumstances.
That’s it.
This will undoubtedly feel “thin” to some people. For example, it doesn’t tell you what to believe or even what to value. That’s intentional.
The axioms above are not proposed as values. They’re proposed as instruments.
Classical “thick” moral theories require a kind of cosmic knowledge that is supposed to generate a broad agreement that never arrives. This framework is narrower and nearly impossible to escape:
If a political system can’t adapt, can’t include the people it governs, or can’t limit violence, then whatever else it promises, it can’t support human flourishing—regardless of what anyone thinks flourishing is.
This framework makes testable predictions.
It does not predict which slogans will win or which policies will pass. It predicts how and why political systems fail. Those predictions are falsifiable—but to be fair, the test results take decades.
Still, it can be refuted. Just point to a human polity that permanently suppressed agency, froze its rules, and/or persistently excluded some of the people it governed without collapsing or resorting to violence.
If it’s true, then we can say something simple but deeply uncomfortable:
every current political system will fail
even yours
because all of them violate the primary constraints in some way.
If that seems grandiose, consider the laws of thermodynamics. They do not design engines. They tell you which engine designs will fail, allowing you to design working engines—even very excellent ones.
In fact, it’s fair to describe this framework as a thermodynamic theory of politics: not because politics is physics, but because living, self-regulating systems such as people spontaneously generate internal pressure.2
There’s still an art to designing good government, but this is the science. Just as the laws of thermodynamics don’t specify what a Ferrari looks like, this framework doesn’t describe a good government—it rules out the bad ones.
These aren’t extra principles. They are things that cannot be true if the framework is true.
If uncertainty is real, and people spontaneously think and act autonomously, then no configuration will be permanent. If change happens, then the future will be different—on a long enough time scale, very different—and the people of the future will want what they want.
Any claim that says politics is solved or history has ended is structurally doomed on some time frame.
This isn’t pessimism. It simply denies a political Rapture. There are no “end times.” The people of the future will be just as messy as the people of today (but with lasers and cool shades).
The best you can ever get is maximally stable participation under local conditions.
Perfect justice assumes a shared standard by which outcomes can be judged. And yet, people who are honest, well-intended, and acting in good faith still routinely disagree—not about whether murder is wrong, but about whether a particular act counts as murder (versus self-defense or just plain negligence).
Justice depends on judgment: which facts matter, which motives count, which risks were reasonable. As a result, some people will perceive justice where others perceive injustice—not because they are confused or malicious but because they have different values, different experiences, and necessarily occupy different points of view in space.
A system committed to eliminating injustice can:
tolerate disagreement, or
impose a single measure by force.
The first minimizes injustice. The second hides it with an accounting trick.
Injustice can and should be reduced. But there is no such thing as “perfect justice.”
Think of it like musical chairs. Technocracy fails because at any given moment, when the music stops: experts disagree, expertise lags reality, and decisions must still be made under uncertainty.
When things change, administration cannot justify, revise, or replace the existing rules without:
re-entering politics, or
resorting to coercion
Guess which one they pick.
Any system that requires uniform belief, moral unanimity, or permanent moral asymmetry will eventually fracture or turn violent because all of the people will:
never agree on everything
never agree forever
People will continue to think and act autonomously whether you forbid it or not.
Therefore, coexistence always requires tolerating wrongness. And that’s not just, like, my opinion, man.
Heading some people off at the pass.
Hobbes treated violence as the natural baseline and resolved it through sovereign finality.
This framework treats violence as the default failure mode, not the baseline, and rejects final authority because it blocks revision.
It’s not that life is “nasty, brutish, and short.” It’s that whatever life is, it’s punctuated by unresolved conflict—and any system that pretends otherwise eventually reaches for force.
Realism centers power, interests, and domination and treats norms as epiphenomenal or ornamental.
This framework treats norms and rules as coordination technology, with power as a variable in stability, not a source of legitimacy.
Might does not make right. But when coordination fails, people who believe otherwise tend to make themselves very relevant, very quickly.
Burke emphasizes tradition and slow evolution and is deeply skeptical of rational reconstruction.
This framework is not hostile to tradition but allows change when it preserves what tradition is meant to preserve.
Traditions survive only insofar as they remain adaptive. Inheritance matters, but stability and flourishing matter more.
Liberal moralism grounds legitimacy in rights, dignity, or consent—often abstractly and treats violations as moral outrages.
This framework grounds legitimacy in a negative condition—rejection of what prevents flourishing—and treats violations as mechanical inhibitors rather than moral affronts.
Rights may be fundamental. This framework doesn’t decide. It simply says that whether rights are metaphysically sacred is secondary to whether they actually work.
I will get accused of this by people who did not pay attention.
Cynicism says ideals are fake.
Nihilism says nothing matters.
This position says coordination matters, and without it, violence returns. That isn’t nihilism.
It may be tragic, but it doesn’t despair. Insofar as the framework identifies real constraints and workable remedies, it’s grounds for cautious optimism.
This framework is not a restatement or defense of the American political system under a different name.
It does not privilege:
constitutional republics
federalism
representative government
bicameral legislatures
democracy
markets
individual rights
The American system is neither source material nor an exception.
Where similarities exist, they exist for a simple reason: the American Founders were grappling with many of the same constraints—uncertainty, disagreement, faction, violence, and the problem of revision.
They arrived at one historically contingent set of solutions. Some of those solutions addressed these constraints. Others introduced new failure modes that are now familiar.
Like any other polity, the United States will succeed or fail to the extent that it respects or violates these constraints. If it’s serious about succeeding, it probably needs to resurrect amendments.
This is the part people will love. Here are the systems we know will not work along with why.
Primary violations:
Uncertainty
Revisability
Failure mode:
Assumes that once correct consciousness or material conditions are achieved, politics ends or becomes purely administrative.
Why it fails:
Material conditions inevitably change—pandemic, war, technological shock, ecological stress.
Disagreement does not disappear once the “right” conditions are declared achieved.
Revision becomes betrayal, so compliance substitutes for consent.
Result:
Coercive stagnation and periodic purges framed as “defense of the revolution,” culminating—predictably—in another revolution.
Primary violations:
Autonomy
Participation
Failure mode:
Treats disagreement as ignorance, misinformation, or cognitive error rather than persistent divergence of values.
Why it fails:
Experts disagree.
Expertise lags events.
People resist being optimized, even when optimization is well-intentioned.
Result:
Rule by procedure that drifts into policy theater. Evasion becomes normal (black markets, shadow expertise), and legitimacy decays until revolt or capture resets the system.
Primary violations:
Participation
Enforcement
Failure mode:
Assumes exit and voluntary contracts can replace collective coordination.
Why it fails:
Exit is unevenly available and asymmetrically costly.
Power in social systems compounds rather than remaining evenly distributed.
Contract enforcement and redistribution require mechanisms the theory disallows.
Result:
De facto polities emerge anyway—unacknowledged and unaccountable. Warlords, cartels, or princes fill the gap, eventually collapsing into one of the more stable failure modes.
Primary violations:
Participation
Revisability
Failure mode:
Attempts to suppress autonomous behavior by treating people as programmable components—or zombies.
Why it fails:
Autonomous action reappears as sabotage, black markets, or rebellion.
Adaptation to changing conditions occurs only through elite fracture or violence.
Result:
Long periods of apparent stability conceal brittle systems that fail suddenly and catastrophically.
Primary violation:
Participation
Failure mode:
Defines some subjects as permanent outsiders or secondary participants under the rules that govern them.
Why it fails:
Excluded groups do not disappear or stop wanting what others visibly have.
Stability requires escalating coercion to maintain exclusion.
Result:
Chronic instability punctuated by repression, insurgency, and eventual war or territorial fragmentation.
Primary violation:
Revisability
Failure mode:
Treats certain rules as sacred rather than structurally necessary.
Why it fails:
Change is inevitable. Edge cases arise and accumulate.
Conflicts between absolutes emerge but revision/adaptation is taboo.
Result:
Either quiet decay into another form or violent rupture after an inciting event.
democracy
constitutionalism
markets
welfare states
cultural pluralism
and so on
It also does not say they work. Any system can and will fail where it violates the core principles. However, some systems are not excluded outright.
This framework doesn’t tell you what political system to build. It tells you which ones won’t last. That doesn’t make it pessimistic or nihilistic. It makes it useful.
It works the way thermodynamics works because human polities are composed of living, self-regulating systems that spontaneously generate action. Action creates collision. Collision creates pressure. Pressure can be managed, redirected, or released, but it cannot be eliminated. Political systems that pretend otherwise don’t transcend conflict—they defer it to their children.
We can do better. Systems that respect these constraints will, on average, suck less. They will fail more slowly, break less violently, and adapt more often.3 But, importantly, there is no future where politics doesn’t suck.
That isn’t because people are uniquely terrible. It’s because they’re alive.
Note on homeostasis
Homeostasis is often described as balance, but that description is misleading. Living systems do not maintain themselves by settling into equilibrium. They maintain themselves through continuous disequilibrium.
Consider an engine left running. Even at idle it consumes fuel, produces heat, and requires regulation to avoid stalling or overheating. Apparent calm does not mean nothing is happening.
Same for riding a bicycle. You do not stay upright by holding still. You stay upright by constantly adjusting—shifting weight, correcting direction, expending energy. Stop making those corrections (stop expending energy), and you don’t achieve “balance”—you fall.
Human beings are systems of this kind. They regulate themselves internally, generate activity on their own, and correct in response to changing conditions. When many such agents share a space, that internally generated activity creates pressure. Politics begins at the point where those interactions require coordination in lieu of collision.
Political stability, in this sense, is not an end state, not an equilibrium to be reached. It’s more like staying upright on a bicycle—day after day, in calm weather and rough, while angry strangers try to knock you over. That requires more than continuous effort. It requires continuous vigilance.
For those wanting a more formal argument:
The Second Law is not about disorder; it’s about irreversible constraint.
In any closed or effectively closed system, usable energy degrades. You can locally reverse it, but only by exporting entropy elsewhere.Life exists by temporarily resisting that gradient.
Biological systems maintain order by consuming energy and exporting waste. Homeostasis is not equilibrium, not “balance.” It is managed imbalance. Living systems must continually act or decay.Humans are living systems with internal regulatory loops.
Desire, belief, status-seeking, meaning-making, and error are not cultural accidents. They are manifestations of internal regulation (and evolutionary pressures) under energy constraints.Therefore, pressure is generated internally, not merely imposed externally.
Humans do not wait for injustice or scarcity to act. They generate variance and activity simply by continuing to live, adapt, seek, and ponder.Politics is the coordination problem created when multiple independent homeostatic systems share resources.
Conflict is both a failure mode of politics and a raw input.Violence is what happens when the system cannot dissipate internally generated pressure non-destructively.
That is the political equivalent of thermal runaway.
For readers accustomed to formal modeling: the framework can be sketched as a driven, dissipative system in which internally generated pressure must be dissipated faster than it accumulates. This can be represented schematically as
\(\frac{dP}{dt} = G_{\text{int}} + G_{\text{ext}} - D\)
where
\(\begin{aligned} P &:\ \text{accumulated political pressure (latent conflict potential)} \\ G_{\text{int}} &:\ \text{internally generated pressure (endogenous disagreement and variance)} \\ G_{\text{ext}} &:\ \text{externally injected pressure (shocks)} \\ D &:\ \text{institutional dissipation of pressure through non-violent contestation and revision} \end{aligned}\)
This representation is illustrative rather than predictive. It adds no content to the argument and introduces no measurable parameters. Its purpose is only to show that the framework maps cleanly onto the behavior of driven systems without claiming quantitative precision.
Note on ancient success
The apparent political success of early anarchic societies is largely a function of favorable thermodynamics. Regimes in the ancient world were long-lived not because of design superiority but operating conditions. They were small, low-power social systems coupled to massive external stabilizers—geography, subsistence, shared lineage, and shared myth—that dissipated pressure. Even then, all of them eventually failed. None would last more than a generation or two in modern conditions.
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