Why Disruption Now Works—and What That Says About Us
The Present Moment
The United States is not merely polarized; it is epistemically fractured. Shared assumptions about truth, legitimacy, and institutional restraint—once treated as background conditions of civic life—are now openly contested. What feels new is not disagreement, but the normalization of bad faith as a governing style.
Recent actions and rhetoric by Donald Trump make this fracture difficult to ignore. His continued assault on electoral legitimacy, routine dismissal of courts and regulatory institutions, instrumental use of grievance, and preference for loyalty over competence are no longer marginal phenomena. They occur at the center of American politics, with the effect—if not always the explicit intent—of weakening constraints on personal power.
Precision matters here. Trump did not invent institutional fragility, public distrust, or resentment toward expertise; those forces predate him by decades. But he has exploited them systematically, converting latent weaknesses into active stressors. In systems terms, he functions less as a cause than as an accelerant—lowering thresholds, normalizing norm violations, and demonstrating that consequences once assumed to be automatic are, in fact, optional.
Complex systems rarely fail all at once. They enter periods in which stabilizing structures—norms, professional standards, shared narratives—lose their binding force. In such periods, actors willing to violate assumptions of good faith gain disproportionate influence, not because they offer viable solutions, but because the system can no longer contain them.
What we are witnessing, then, is not simply a divisive political figure or an unusually contentious era. It is a deeper phase shift, one in which legitimacy erodes faster than institutions can adapt and disruption is mistaken for strength.
To make sense of this moment requires stepping back from personalities and asking a more uncomfortable question: what phase of the cycle are we in, and why does behavior like this now work?
The Concept of Panarchy
I’ve written about Panarchy, but a brief overview is salient for this post. Panarchy emerged from ecology and systems science, most notably through the work of C. S. Holling and colleagues studying why complex ecosystems sometimes collapse despite appearing stable. Rather than viewing systems as linear or steadily progressive, panarchy describes how complex adaptive systems cycle through recurring phases of growth (r), conservation (K), release (Ω), and reorganization (α). Its central insight is that systems optimized for efficiency and stability gradually lose resilience, becoming brittle and vulnerable to shock. When disruption occurs, accumulated structure is released during the Ω phase—not as random chaos, but as a predictable breakdown of norms and constraints that creates both danger and opportunity. Crucially, panarchy operates across scales: collapse at one level can coexist with adaptation at another, and reorganization may follow—but is never guaranteed.
Civilization in the Ω Phase
Or: Why This Feels Like Collapse—and Why That’s Only Part of the Story
There is a particular kind of grief that comes with watching something you love become unrecognizable. It is not nostalgia for a mythical golden age, nor denial of past injustice. It is the grief of recognizing that a shared civic reality—once anchored, however imperfectly, in institutions, norms, and good-faith reasoning—has fractured.
For many of us, the shock is not that American democracy is flawed. We always knew that. The shock is how quickly those flaws were exploited once it became clear that many guardrails were cultural rather than structural. Once adherence to norms became optional, their fragility was exposed.¹
Panarchy offers a way to understand this moment without collapsing into partisan diagnosis or personality-driven explanation. It frames what we are experiencing not as anomaly, but as a classic Ω phase—a period of release following long conservation.²
Postwar America experienced decades of growth and conservation. Institutions expanded. Expertise mattered. Professional norms were enforced socially because they rarely needed formal enforcement. Over time, success bred complacency. Systems optimized for efficiency but lost resilience.³ We assumed competence was self-evident and that facts were intrinsically persuasive.
Ω phases punish those assumptions.
They favor emotion over evidence, grievance over competence, and identity over outcomes. They elevate figures who break systems not because they can rebuild them, but because destruction itself feels like agency to people who no longer trust the system to serve them.⁴
This pattern is not new.
The late Roman Republic did not collapse suddenly, nor because of a single villain. It depended on norms of restraint that worked only as long as actors respected them. When those norms were violated by figures like Sulla and Caesar, the system lacked the resilience to respond. Strongmen emerged not because Romans rejected republicanism, but because institutional legitimacy had already eroded.⁵
The Weimar Republic followed a similar trajectory. It failed not because Germans abandoned democracy out of ignorance, but because repeated shocks—economic collapse, political violence, humiliation narratives—pushed the system into Ω. Democratic mechanisms persisted on paper while trust dissolved. Extremists thrived not by solving problems, but by offering identity, certainty, and enemies.⁶
The lesson is uncomfortable but consistent: release phases invert selection pressure. They reward those least suited to long-term governance and punish institutions designed for good-faith participation.
This helps explain why contemporary American politics feels performative rather than functional. Policy coherence matters less than signaling. Nostalgia replaces adaptation. Strongmen replace institutions. These are not governance strategies; they are aesthetic choices, offering reassurance that the past can be restored if only the right norms are broken and the right enemies punished.
Panarchy also clarifies why appeals to data or long-term consequences so often fail. Ω phases are not rational optimization problems; they are legitimacy crises. When trust collapses, facts lose their anchoring power.⁷
What panarchy does not say—and this matters—is that collapse is destiny.
Adaptive cycles operate at multiple scales. National politics can remain in Ω while other layers quietly reorganize. Science continues. Courts still constrain behavior more often than not. Cities solve practical problems. Professional communities maintain standards. These are not signs of denial; they are signs of distributed resilience.⁸
This is what makes the moment especially painful for those who came of age during late-K America. We were trained to believe that institutions self-correct, that expertise prevails, and that adults remain in charge. Panarchy reveals those beliefs to be contingent rather than guaranteed.
It also reframes the role of those who feel alienated now. Anger and grief are often dismissed as pessimism or nostalgia. But in panarchical terms, such people may be performing a critical function: memory preservation. They remember when competence constrained power, when truth mattered, and when norm violations carried real cost.⁸
Reorganization without memory produces mythology, not renewal.
Ω phases are destabilizing by definition. They are ugly, unfair, and exhausting. They do real harm, especially to those least able to absorb it.
But panarchy offers something punditry does not: legibility. It reframes chaos as a phase rather than a verdict. Civilizations rarely fall in a single moment. They erode, rupture, clear—and sometimes rebuild.³
Whether reorganization leads to renewal or entrenchment will depend less on any individual than on whether enough of the system retains the capacity to learn rather than mythologize, to adapt rather than regress, and to rebuild legitimacy rather than weaponize resentment.
That outcome is not guaranteed. But it is not foreclosed.
The question is not whether we are in the Ω phase.
The question is what we choose to carry forward when reorganization finally begins—and whether we have the discipline to distinguish memory from nostalgia, and learning from grievance.
Summary
This essay was written at a moment when norm erosion is no longer abstract. When a former president attacks electoral legitimacy, disparages courts, rewards loyalty over competence, and treats institutional constraint as an obstacle rather than a safeguard, generalities are no longer sufficient.
Donald Trump is not the sole cause of the current Ω phase. Systems do not enter release because of a single actor. But he has been an unusually effective accelerant—testing boundaries, demonstrating that violations carry fewer consequences than once assumed, and normalizing bad faith as a viable political strategy.
The danger now cuts in two directions: personalizing what is fundamentally systemic, or retreating into abstraction to avoid naming what is plainly happening. Systems thinking is not an excuse for moral evasion.
The work of this moment is not to predict collapse or promise renewal, but to maintain epistemic discipline under pressure—to resist false equivalence, performative neutrality, and exhaustion masquerading as realism. Ω phases reward certainty, grievance, and spectacle; they punish restraint and institutional loyalty. The fact that such behavior now “works” is itself diagnostic.
Reorganization, if it comes, will not be driven by outrage alone, nor by pretending this is politics as usual. It will require memory, standards, and the willingness to say—clearly and without hysteria—that some behaviors are corrosive regardless of who benefits from them.
This is not a call for nostalgia or a prediction of collapse. It is a reminder that clarity is not despair. In periods of epistemic breakdown, the most consequential form of agency may be the least visible one: continuing to distinguish what feels good from what works, and what merely disrupts from what actually endures.
Endnotes
- Levitsky, S., & Ziblatt, D. (2018). How democracies die. Crown Publishing.
- Gunderson, L. H., & Holling, C. S. (2002). Panarchy: Understanding transformations in human and natural systems. Island Press.
- Holling, C. S. (1986). The resilience of terrestrial ecosystems: Local surprise and global change. In Sustainable development of the biosphere. Cambridge University Press.
- Kahan, D. M. (2013). Ideology, motivated reasoning, and cognitive reflection. Judgment and Decision Making, 8(4), 407–424.
- Flower, H. I. (2010). Roman republics. Princeton University Press.
- Peukert, D. J. K. (1992). The Weimar Republic: The crisis of classical modernity. Hill and Wang.
- Habermas, J. (1975). Legitimation crisis. Beacon Press.
- Ostrom, E. (2010). Polycentric systems for coping with collective action. American Economic Review, 100(3), 641–672.
Confronting Mediocrity 