The Signal #20
In search of equilibrium.
One of the more thought-provoking essays I read this week came from Benn Steil, who drew on Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach to explore why rules-based international orders eventually encounter problems they cannot solve from within. His argument draws on Gödel's incompleteness theorem and Kenneth Arrow's impossibility theorem, two ideas from very different disciplines that nevertheless point towards a common insight: sufficiently complex systems eventually reach the limits of what their own internal logic can resolve.
It is tempting to read this just as another argument about the decline of the liberal international order. I think it points to something more fundamental.
We tend to judge governance systems as though equilibrium were their natural state and disruption their failure mode. But what if equilibrium is only ever temporary?
Every governance system reflects a particular balance between competing interests, values and distributions of power. Rules emerge from that balance. Yet the environment they govern never stands still. Technologies evolve, economies transform, societies change and new actors gain influence while existing institutions gradually lose authority. Over time, the assumptions embedded in the rules drift away from the reality they were designed to organise.
Eventually the system encounters challenges it cannot comfortably resolve. We call this institutional crisis. From a systems perspective, however, this may simply be what adaptive systems look like.
This changes how we think about governance. The objective is not to construct institutions that remain permanently stable. Such institutions probably do not exist. The challenge is to build institutions capable of continually finding a new equilibrium as the societies they govern continue to evolve.
That represents a different philosophy of institutional design. Rather than treating stability as the preservation of existing arrangements, it treats stability as the capacity to adapt without losing legitimacy.
If equilibrium is temporary rather than permanent, institutional change ceases to be an exceptional event. Constitutional reform, democratic innovation and institutional redesign become part of the normal adaptive cycle of complex societies. As circumstances evolve, institutions must periodically realign the balance between purpose, power, incentives and voice to remain legitimate and effective.
Perhaps that is the real signal. In a world where technology, geopolitics and social expectations are changing faster than our institutions, governance itself is becoming a continuous process of rebalancing. The societies that prove most resilient may not be those with the strongest or strictest rules, but those that build the institutional capacity to adapt, recalibrate and find a new (and better) equilibrium without losing the public trust on which those rules ultimately depend.
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Sunny regards (and see you in September),
Sanja
Keep reading
Geoff’s Substack: The Progressive Puzzle
The Renovator: What Is Civic Education For?
Project Syndicate: Three Essentials of a More Equal World Order