The previous cluster of this project described the unravelling of what is loosely recognised as the world order: that is, the system of international organisations, rules and treaties, plus the consensus on orthodox economics and liberal democracy, that has for decades represented an imperfect but workable framework for global cooperation and social progress. It labelled the current state of affairs a polycrisis: an environment where new problems emerge faster than they can be addressed, creating a dominant emotional register of fear and hopelessness around the ability of institutions to respond adequately. It argued that this unravelling is occurring because those institutions themselves are not fit for purpose.

Every era of human history has had its crises. What distinguishes this one is not the severity of the problems — earlier generations faced far worse — but the absence, at the level necessary, of anything resembling adaptation. The machinery is not just unravelling; it does not even seem to be trying to adapt.

That previous essay argued that the thread that runs through the unravelling of the world order is its failure to put in place governance mechanisms that adequately address the reality that political elites will always lean heavily toward governing in their own interests rather than those of their citizens. This essay tries to go one layer deeper. It seeks to unpack the assumptions embedded in political systems that preserve the status quo and consistently prevent the creative, adaptive response that the challenges of the modern world require. This is the heart of the problem.

To properly understand the current dynamic, or perhaps more correctly the lack of dynamic, it helps to begin with a longer view.

The period from roughly the mid-seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth was one of extraordinary fertility in the design of governance. The concepts that now feel like permanent features of the political landscape — constitutional government, the separation of powers, universal suffrage, the rule of law, federalism as a mechanism for managing subsidiarity, the sovereignty of the nation-state as the organising principle of international order — were all invented, debated, refined, and institutionalised over a roughly three-hundred-year window. The Treaty of Westphalia, the American and French revolutions, the successive British Reform Acts, the Meiji Restoration, the construction of the League of Nations and then the United Nations, the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the establishment of the IMF, World Bank and WTO , decolonisation: these were genuine innovations, radical in their time, and hugely consequential for the world order as we know it today.

Since the flurry of activity in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War though, almost nothing of equivalent significance has been attempted. The European Union, whose foundational treaties span from Rome in 1957 to Maastricht in 1992, is probably the only meaningful institutional innovation of the post-war period — and even it has had no reformulation of its democratic architecture since Maastricht. The G20 came into existence and is occasionally consequential, but within a narrow and marginal range. Life has been breathed into the International Court of Justice, but its remit remains highly circumscribed, and its successful prosecutions limited.

Within nations, political evolution has become effectively impossible across some of the world’s most consequential democracies. The United States in particular has not amended its constitution in any substantive way since the Civil War era. Japanese constitutional reform to allow its defence forces to become more internationally engaged is proceeding at a glacial pace. Australia has consistently failed to pass any constitutional changes for more than a generation. The UK failed to pass a modest proposal to switch to preferential voting, and then chose to retreat from institutional innovation through the Brexit vote.

Something that looks very much like institutional sclerosis has taken hold — a calcification of governance form at the precise moment when the demands placed on governance are expanding most rapidly.

The Ossification of Governance

There is a respectable case for stability, and intellectual honesty requires being open about it. Governance systems that endure provide continuity and certainty; they create the predictable environment in which long-run investment, social trust, and institutional knowledge accumulate. The history of revolutionary governance change is littered with catastrophes — revolutions that devoured their authors, constitutional experiments that simply enabled authoritarianism, international institutions whose ambitious mandates overreached any available enforcement. The conservative instinct that treats institutional stability as a virtue in its own right is not merely self-interested, it is genuinely legitimate.

But this argument confuses two things: the virtue of stability and the virtue of the current arrangement. A system can be stable and adequate; it can also be stable and failing. The question is not whether governance institutions should change, but whether the current ones are capable of responding to the challenges placed before them — and whether the mechanisms exist to force adaptation when the institutions are inadequate. In markets, the answer to institutional failure is creative destruction: firms that cannot adapt to changed conditions are displaced by those that can, and the resources they were consuming are reallocated to more productive purposes. Political institutions are largely insulated from this mechanism. They can persist in a state of functional failure for extended periods, held together by inertia, elite self-interest, and the absence of an alternative, without facing any equivalent of bankruptcy or competitive displacement.

The decline of Venice offers a striking historical illustration. The city-state had, by the early fourteenth century, developed genuinely inclusive institutions — systems of political participation and commercial law that distributed opportunity broadly and created incentives across the population. Then in 1297-98, the ruling oligarchy implemented the Serrata: a formal closure of the Grand Council to new members, effectively locking in the existing elite and converting inclusive institutions into extractive ones. Venice did not collapse immediately; it limped on for nearly two centuries, still wealthy by the standards of the time, still powerful by reputation. But the atrophy had begun, and the decline was ultimately irreversible. What Venice lacked was any internal mechanism by which the Serrata could be challenged, reversed, or circumvented. The elite had captured the system, and the system had no means of reclaiming itself.

The parallel with contemporary governance is uncomfortable but instructive. The observation that bi-partisan majorities of voters in the United States — across political affiliations and across demographic groups — believe that the system is broken is striking precisely because it coexists with the near-total absence, among political leaders of any stripe, of proposals to reform it. This is not a coincidence. Elites owe their incumbency to the current system; it is the mechanism by which they arrived at power and the framework within which their advantages compound. They are structurally the last people who will advocate for its fundamental reform, regardless of their sincere beliefs about its adequacy. This is not cynicism, it is a prediction that history validates with depressing consistency. The assumption embedded in this dynamic — that disruptive change in governance systems is necessarily more dangerous than gradual decay — is an assumption that is being refuted daily by the pervasive mood of the times.

The Refuge of Sovereignty

The second assumption that deserves critical questioning is the sanctity of sovereignty, which is possibly the greatest refuge of the incumbent elite, as discussed in greater detail in The Sovereignty Fallacy. Sovereignty, as a concept, contains two subtly different notions that political discourse routinely conflates. The first is the right of a defined community of citizens, however constituted, to determine its own collective affairs, to make binding decisions about how they are governed, and to maintain the conditions for self-determination. This version of sovereignty is genuinely worth defending; it is, at its core, what democracy means. The second is the sovereignty claimed by governing elites as a shield against external accountability — the invocation of territorial jurisdiction to insulate rulers from scrutiny of how they treat their own populations, resist international obligations they find inconvenient, and maintain control over the mechanisms that check their power. These two things are not only different; they are frequently in tension, and political discourse consistently fails to disentangle them.

Fundamental to the persistence of sovereignty as the prerogative of the rulers, rather than the ruled, is the concept of the nation-state. The nation-state is, as an administrative unit, generally fit for purpose. It provides a defined community with a shared legal framework, a common language of democratic participation, and a structure for social insurance and public goods provision. But it is rigid in a way that creates a persistent mismatch between the scale of governance and the scale of challenges. Any given nation-state will be too large for some functions and too small for others. Federal systems and administrative sub-divisions manage the sub-national version of this problem reasonably well — provinces, cantons, and communes handle genuinely local issues at genuinely local scale. But there is no equivalent mechanism for the supra-national level short of full federation - a solution that offers the benefit of scale, but at the expense of losing cultural identity.

The result is that challenges that benefit from governance at scale — climate, supply chain resilience, the management of economic coercion, defence — remain sub-optimally addressed by nation-states that lack mass. What matters here is naming the assumption that perpetuates this institutional deficiency — that the nation-state is the natural and sufficient peak unit of governance for all collective problems, and that any arrangement above it is a threat to sovereignty rather than an extension of democratic self-determination.

Cultural False-Equivalence

The third assumption runs deeper and is more sensitive: it is the assumption that national culture is, at best, irrelevant to governance outcomes, and at worst a prejudicial construct that licenses discrimination and determinism.

Autocratic leaders frequently cite an incompatibility between the cultural values of the country they rule, and western ideals of liberal democracy. Often, their protestations are valid – a sophisticated liberal democracy requires a level of political literacy from its citizens that much of the world simply lacks. For instance, when given the opportunity to vote in elections, constituencies with a collectivist culture that prioritises social connection over principle tend reliably toward supporting candidates based on identity and ethnicity rather than ideology. Trying to transplant a political system designed around the competition of ideas onto a society that thinks in terms of clan loyalty leads inevitably toward institutionalisation of favouritism and patronage.

To stop here though is lazy and disingenuous, and allows political incumbents to insulate themselves against competition and change.

Challenging this construct requires addressing two questions: The first is whether cultures can change, or whether they are essentially immutable on any timescale that is meaningful. The second, which is an uncomfortable question to ask, is whether some cultures are more conducive to socially desirable outcomes than others.

Considering the first question first, research points toward a very specific mechanism for culture change – generational replacement. Essentially, most people’s values are formed by the time they are in their early 20’s and these values largely remain unchanged for the rest of their life. Cultural evolution within a population occurs as the old are displaced by the young, at least to the extent that the young hold a different set of values. According to this theory, cultural change at the national level is only possible over the timescale of generations.

While this may be true, there are good reasons to believe that societies can change more quickly. Other research has shown that what matters isn’t so much values as behaviours. This has two dimensions. First, behaviours are actions and ultimately what matters for the functioning of a society isn’t what people believe so much as what they do. Second, values can be influenced by behaviours. When people start behaving in a way that is not directly aligned with their values, the dissonance can start to become uncomfortable. Human nature is to align the belief system more closely to the behaviour so as to remove the discomfort. Through this mechanism values can subtly change over time if the environment requires it.

What this mechanism demands though is leadership. Leadership is essential to create the context in which people are required to behave in ways that potentially challenge their values. Leadership is also required to provide people with the licence to change their values. At any age, most people have a strong psychological need to feel they belong within their peer group, and values are a core element of identity. Creating the emotional safety required for people to change their values is possible by authority figures modelling the values and behaviours.

Turning to the second question, there is a strand of thought that resists efforts to impose liberal democracy on developing countries as a form of cultural imperialism. The intellectual history of this resistance is understandable. Cultural explanations of economic and political outcomes have frequently been used as cover for racism, colonial condescension, and the naturalisation of inequality. The reaction against culturally based theories of human development in mainstream social science has been largely appropriate.

The risk though is that the legitimate desire to avoid defining people by their circumstances compromises an equally valid need to interrogate the effect of collectively dominant values and behaviours on social, political, and economic outcomes at the societal level.

This is a topic that deserves to be interrogated deeply, and a future paper will tackle the many dimensions of this question. The point I would make here is to return to the central argument of this entire project, that the role of government should be to maximise the sustainable wellbeing of its citizens. What is undeniable is that there is a strong correlation between liberal democracy and subjective wellbeing. The flow of causation can be disputed, but there are very strong grounds to believe that a culture of tolerance, equality, and objectivity supports widespread flourishing, and that this delivers improved economic as well as social outcomes. Any genuine effort to try to improve wellbeing needs to engage open-mindedly with the contention that culture is a meaningful variable that is available to governments to influence. To refuse to engage on this point is not moral neutrality; it is the abdication of the moral reasoning that is essential if aspirations to improving human happiness is to be taken seriously. To go further and use established culture as a justification for pursuing a political system that denies citizens the ability to exercise their democratic rights on the pretext of protecting them from themselves, is to infantilise them.

Institutional Redesign

These three assumptions — that disruptive governance change is inherently dangerous, that the sovereignty of the nation-state is sacrosanct, and that national culture is immutable and needs to dictate the political system — are each held, not because they have been examined and found correct, but because they are comfortable for those whose interests they protect. They are the assumptions of incumbency. Challenging them requires something that existing governance systems are structurally poor at generating: the willingness to design institutions capable of overriding elite self-interest, and to sustain that design against the predictable resistance of the elites whose interests it overrides.

It is in this context that this project is floating two broad concepts for novel governance systems.

The first is a new trans-national body to which member nation states would cede a minimalist scope of their powers. This body would have two key functions: first to provide the mass needed for middle powers and smaller states to protect their sovereignty against the malign actions of great powers, and second, to protect the sovereignty of citizens against the self-interest of their political elites. I have coined the term sovereigncy to describe this concept: a term that focusses not so much on the entity itself, as the core idea that a stronger system is needed to protect the sovereignty of citizens.

The second idea is related but addresses a different gap. Every existing democratic system has institutions to make policy, and institutions to execute it. What almost none has is a permanent institution specifically empowered to manage the system of governance itself — to continuously review whether the constitutional and procedural architecture remains fit for purpose, to identify where creative destruction is needed, and to propose reform against the resistance of incumbents who benefit from the status quo. A standing constitutional body with this as its sole mandate — not governing, but governing the rules of governing — would be a genuine institutional innovation. It would give a democratic voice to the interest in systemic renewal that currently has no vehicle, and it would address, at least partially, the Venice problem: the absence of any internal mechanism by which a captured system can reclaim itself. This concept I have called tribunicy.

These two concepts are explained and developed in greater detail in the Governance for Happiness essay.

The Idols

The common thread through this essay is a specific kind of political failure, the failure of the elite to question the system that they exist within. It is the failure to distinguish between the value of stability and the comfort of stagnation; between the legitimate claim of communities to self-determination and the illegitimate claim of elites to self-perpetuation; between the importance of respecting cultural difference and the abdication of judgement about which cultural values produce better or worse outcomes for human beings. These distinctions are difficult to make in public, because they require accepting complexity, tolerating uncertainty, and resisting the pressure toward the simplifications that political discourse rewards. They are also, as the situation deteriorates and the gap between what governance systems can deliver and what the world requires of them continues to widen, increasingly urgent.

Francis Bacon, in Novum Organum (1620), identified four categories of systematic error that he called “idols of the mind” — false beliefs and distortions that obstruct clear reasoning and prevent the advancement of knowledge. The fourth of these, the Idols of the Theatre, he saw as the received philosophical and ideological systems — the dogmas of schools and traditions — accepted so uncritically and performed so repeatedly that they have come to be mistaken for descriptions of reality. Bacon chose the theatre as his metaphor deliberately: these idols resemble stage plays, he wrote, “representing worlds of their own creation after an unreal and scenic fashion.” They are not observations; they are scripts.

I see the three assumptions examined in this essay as Idols of the Theatre in Bacon’s sense. None of them has the status of a tested proposition — each has the status of a performance. The assumption that disruptive governance change is inherently more dangerous than gradual institutional decay; the assumption that sovereignty is the prerogative of governing elites and not of the citizens they govern; the assumption that national culture is fixed and must determine the boundaries of the politically possible — these beliefs persist not because they have been examined and found correct, but because they are convenient for those whose interests they protect. They have been delivered from enough stages, by enough authoritative voices, that actors and audiences alike have lost sight of the fact that what they are watching is a play.

The ideas I have floated here are at an early stage, and no claim is made that they are either necessary or adequate for the challenges of the current time. But the compelling conclusion of this and the previous essay must be that existing institution have little interest in identifying and promoting innovative solutions.