"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?"
- George Tsakraklides, from "The One Attribute of All Systems Everyone Underestimates." The George Tsakraklides View Substack, 8 August 2026.
