Falling Towards Equilibrium

History 101: The World Is Never, Ever, Ever Static.

Fantasy writers will regularly write that, before the plot began, there were two hundred years in which nothing happened, and then when they want to do that I want to set them on fire. This is partly because I am incredibly picky about fiction¹, but mostly, I submit, it is because they are being unrealistic in the same way that they would be in which they would be if a stapler fell through the earth, smashing through every layer of rock or metal it found before punching through the earth’s core and shooting out the other side of the planet into space.

---

On my desk at Inkhaven, a small notebook stands half-open in a pocket of a wooden office-supplies-container. The force of gravity causes it to lean against the right wall of the pocket, balanced out by the forces keeping the wood of the container intact, which resist and push back. The forces are in balance, with the book leaning slightly at an angle but not falling over. This is an equilibrium.

This notebook here.

Will it last forever? Not likely! When I open the window for fresh air, a breeze will ruffle its pages. At some point I’m going to lean on my desk, causing the notebook to settle into a different position inside the pocket. There’s decent odds someone going past is going to elbow the container, causing it to tip across the floor and scatter all its contents, notebook included, across the floor. And eventually, if left alone for long enough, cold mists will soak it or mice will eat it or the entire building will burn down. All the actions I describe above alter the equilibrium the notebook inhabits. Equilibria might exist that are stable for short times, but not (outside of a few specialist areas like geology) for long periods.

Societies work the same way. If the king thinks his palace would be better blue, and the king is remotely the Guy In Charge, one of the following things is going to happen:

• He orders people to paint it blue and the world becomes more the way he likes it.

• He doesn’t order people to paint it blue because someone gets him not to, or he orders them and they don’t listen. (For instance, his mother likes the way his father painted it and he doesn’t want to offend her, or the bureaucrats of the treasury don’t want to pay the money for it.)

In the first case, society is approaching an equilibrium of forces, where “the king’s whim” is a force. In the second, a counterbalancing force prevents society from changing. These are normally the only sensible options. It would be weird if generation after generation of kings all wanted blue palaces and nobody cared enough to stop them and yet it never happened that their palace became blue.

When something changes in a society, it’s usually downstream of the balance of forces moving more towards equilibrium. The full list of forces gets complex - it includes climate, technology, individual leadership, ideology, the whims of the monarchy, military organization, geopolitics, economic opportunities and the skill of your farmers, and any of these can change as fast as the weather.² One really bad rainfall can alter the attitudes of the peasants towards the government to the point of rebellion, and then things change because the equilibrium is different! Like satellites in space, societies fall towards equilibrium but never reach it.

The single most solidly-in-equilibrium, resistant-to-change society I have ever encountered is Tokugawa Japan, which lasted for more than 250 years. I am incredibly impressed by Tokugawa Ieyasu, who built a far more stable system than any other dictator I have ever encountered. I’m not morally impressed³, just practically, but I am very practically impressed. But even his equilibrium was still imperfect, founded as it was on technological stasis and able government and a population that could feed itself on the land of Japan. As he and his sons died, the quality of rule began to regress the mean. So when the population size and government composition and elite ideology changed, these introduced critical vulnerabilities into the system that (with some help from Admiral Perry) eventually destroyed it.⁴

A lot of people have come up with the idea that these feedback systems ultimately form cycles, the way that the sun warms the water in the ocean and so it grows in heat until some of it becomes mist and the mist rises to become clouds and the clouds drop water in the ocean. I think they’re simplifying the same way that authors who write an unnaturally static world are, just slightly less. I think there are real cycles; I casually used the “elite overproduction” concept in my discussion of the Wars of the Roses, which is one of the popular cycle theories that I think applies in that context. The elite overpopulation theory is that there are situations where you get elites because important jobs need to be filled, then lots of people want these jobs and compete over them and the number of would-be-elites gets really high, then the competition leads to chaos and the chaos leads to a lot of people deciding not to be elites and you’re back to the starting situation. I think it happens, though unlike the people who invented it I am not convinced it happens on a regular schedule. But I don’t think cycles cause everything. The “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times” cycle is one of these immense oversimplifications that fails to map up to the data very well, as I hope to explain in a future post.

But when I talk about how some military systems are more stable than others, I mean that they are closer to equilibrium. For a hereditary military caste to not demand the highest fee it can for playing kingmaker is for it to leave money on the table.⁵ Eventually, I am pretty sure it will pick the money up. When it happens, the military system will be less unnatural, more stable, less inclined to cause chaos, though the transition may well introduce lots of chaos in other areas of the society. Each of these areas will itself attempt to return to some stable equilibrium, causing further chaos with it, and so every society transforms in new and complex ways, obeying higher laws that we mortals can only grasp tiny fractions of.

This raises an important question. Trying to build a setting that is supposed to be the result of the workings-out of complicated laws that we mortals can barely comprehend sounds like a lot of work. Even granting that what I’m describing is the realistic way societies work, why should an author of fantasy or soft SF bother with being realistic if it doesn’t make the story better? Why not just tell the audience to suspend disbelief?

The next post in this series is going to be about why you want to go for in-depth worldbuilding, and just what you get from it.

1. So, so picky.

2. In the Tragedy of the Titanium Tyrant, it also includes “what superpowers people lucked into.” If you’re writing a story with superpowers or ‘wild talents’, they’re one of the highest-leverage spots for turning an equilibrium into what you want it to be.

3. Direct quote: “If fellows of the lower orders go beyond what is proper toward samurai, or if any sub-feudatory samurai is remiss toward a direct retainer, there is no objection to cutting such a one down.”

4. This is another post I owe you all. If you don’t want to wait, Romulus Hillsborough’s Samurai Revolution is so in-depth to be nigh-incomprehensible. I love it so much and I want to read twenty books just like it.

5. Remember, hereditary military caste. Professional armies tend to be different in weird and complex ways, which I hope to explain eventually.