Utopian voters

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Judging from the general shape of historical trends, it looks as though Governments, like living things, are operational only so long as they are in dynamic equilibrium. That the first thing any group setting out to establish a new government must recognize is that government is a dynamic system, and that there can not ever be a secure, stable, dependable government, in the sense that all men, at all times, have always wanted —a government secure and stable in the sense that you can count on it to remain what it is.

The moment a government does become stable, dependable—something you can count on from generation to generation—it’s dead. It will henceforth and forever remain what it was ... but a new government moves in and takes over by revolution, conquest, or simple anarchy-disintegration.

Rome, which was one of the first large-scale true republics, showed the syndrome that has appeared in every century since; it started off with an oligarchy of wise citizens, the patricians. Citizenship was hereditary, of course. And genetics being what it is, that is unstable—but unstable in a random, not a dynamic, fashion. All the molecules in a mass of gas may be moving at ten miles per second—but it may be either an extremely hot gas standing still, with molecules moving at random, or a cold gas moving at high velocity. What government needs is not the instability of random effects, simple heat, but the instability of dynamic motion.

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