The One Attribute of All Systems Everyone Underestimates

I was once asked during an interview: “how do you reform a broken system?” – in other words, how do you change everything? The timeless popularity of this naïve question is evident in the scores of book titles available that promise to literally change the world in 10 steps. There is a reason why I’ve never written such a book, although I could easily have done so, and it would probably have been my biggest bestseller.

Here’s the thing: I simply don’t like selling people elaborate blueprints of crystal palaces they can never build. It is always easy to write something that looks good on paper. Books tend to do that, literally. So, out of respect for my readers, I don’t write hopium romance novels of incredible future civilisations we can build, but never will. We already have religions, green capitalists, Bitcoin influencers and extra-terrestrial cults that have done it for us: they have been selling us fairytales for thousands of years.

I don’t want to be yet another liar. What is the point of offering solutions that can only materialize in a fantastical world where people respected each other, laws protected the Earth, and ordinary citizens were willing to put the future of their children above their crave for petrol, burgers, and iPhones? I would much rather give people an honest diagnosis of what type of world they thought they lived in, what world they actually live in, and what type of species they are, before discussing any speculative scenarios on reforming the unreformable.

Non-fiction horror stories don’t sell copies, but we need them more than ever before. So, tired of seeing other authors talk about incredible solutions to systemic crises without even including a fine print disclaimer on the natural propensity of this species to self-annihilate, the cognitive limitations of humans, and the collective lack of consciousness all of our petri dish civilisations are plagued with to begin with, I decided to make my entire body of work the disclaimer – yes, the one that they never bothered to write. This, in a nutshell, is what I do and who I am as a polycricis author.

Understanding the polycrisis is about understanding systems. My body of work encompasses anything and everything systems-related: biological ecosystems, weather systems, political and economic systems, cognitive systems, and how these may interact. You would think that by now I would have enough of a grasp in these systems to offer realistic exits from our existential problems. But the problem is as much about understanding how systems operate, as it is about how they don’t. Systems are often touted as complex, intelligent contraptions, which they are, and this trips people into believing that systems are malleable and trainable. But they are by definition made to resist evolution. In fact, systems come into existence as machines of obstinacy: like springs in your mattress, systems always want to go back to their former state. A system always wants to maintain itself the way it is, whether it is a brutal dictatorship or the blood pressure in your circulatory system. Much of the discourse on system change naively forgets this important fact. It is not a caveat. It is part of the system itself, residing in the crystal palace like an in-built detonation device.

Humanity is not living in a system. It is part of one, and therefore, humanity itself is part of the problem. We have invented thousands of technologies and written hundreds of thousands of books on how we can heal our economies, societies and ecosystems. None of these books or technologies were addressed to us. They were love letters to a human species that has never existed. One that genuinely wanted to save itself.

Therefore, the serious problem with the question “how do you change a broken system” is both in the “broken”, and in the “change”. Systems are never broken. They are, in fact, perfectly formed: built for the time and place they inhabit, and in fact shaped by that time and place. Like the springs in the mattress, they never want to change as long as they can withstand the force applied. Our societies, economies and technologies evolved in the way they were always meant to evolve, as direct reflections of natural and physical laws of competition, resource extraction, scarcity and abundance. What we perceive as the “wrongs” of the system is nothing but a moral assessment. These “wrongs” are not malfunctions, in strict system terms.

Systems resist change with all their might. Ecosystems may lose their balance, but they eventually heal their wounds and continue in a new configuration. Economic systems simply put their blinders on as carnage takes place in the stock market, but come back from the dead once a collapse has killed everything. Our nervous system is perhaps the most stubborn of all, because it doesn’t even register change: it goes either straight into denial, or into traumatic shock. What all these very different systems have in common, despite their different strategies, is that they consider change the enemy – so much so, that they would rather self-annihilate than take steps to reform themselves. So, next time you discuss system change with someone, explain to them the fundamental raison d’être of every system: to stay the same, or die.

This is why it is never an oxymoron to state that a successful system is also a self-destructive system. Humanity is incredibly successful, but also incredibly self-destructive. The success comes from building resilient systems that robustly resist all reform and external pressure. The demise comes from when these systems eventually come across new parameters that they were never built for. Most times, they fail. A system is only successful as long as the parameters it evolved in stay the same. On a rapidly changing planet the knee-jerk reaction of all of our systems is to commit suicide than have to go through the thought process of conscious, voluntary change: a quality that is foreign to most systems.

Humanity’s problem is therefore not that we lack solutions. We have thousands of them. The problem is that every solution asks a system to do the one thing systems are least inclined to do: change. We keep writing love letters to imaginary humans who are willing to change their minds, sacrifice their interests, abandon their habits and save their descendants. Meanwhile, the real humans remain embedded in systems that reward precisely the opposite behaviour. Perhaps this is why the question “How do we change the system?” has always bothered me. The more important question is:

What happens when the system discovers that we are trying to change it?

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My new book The Biology of Collapse is OUT NOW