In the aftermath of every major crisis, whether it’s a school shooting, economic collapse, or civil rights violation, we’re offered band-aid solutions: Term limits. More police. A fresh face in office. But these fixes are rarely designed for substantive change. Instead, they offer momentary relief while leaving the rules and players untouched.
Take the Affordable Care Act. It expanded access to insurance, yes, but it failed to challenge the core dysfunctions of our healthcare system: employer-based coverage, runaway costs, and for-profit gatekeeping. Because it preserved the old architecture, it was vulnerable. Over time, corporate lobbies, activist judges, and hostile administrations chipped away at it until little of its promise remained. A policy that didn’t touch the foundation couldn’t withstand the storm.
That failure, like so many others, wasn’t just political. It was systemic.
“Systems over Chaos” is a political ideology rooted in the belief that real change doesn’t come from managing symptoms. It comes from fixing the incentives, institutions, and feedback loops that create those symptoms in the first place. It’s about aligning policy with deeper, long-term goals like democratic participation, civil liberty, and collective prosperity.
Instead of term limits for Congress, why not address the real issue: how campaign finance, gerrymandering, and party machines shield incumbents from competition? Instead of vague calls for “common sense gun laws,” why not pursue a voluntary national gun buyback program to steadily reduce the number of firearms in circulation? Instead of tinkering with zoning codes in isolation, why not adopt a land value tax to shift local government incentives toward equitable, sustainable development? Instead of employing more cops, why not make police and prosecutors who violate civil liberties face personal criminal liability, not just internal review?
In each case, the system is engineered to incentivize better outcomes, and better processes, for everyone.
These are not quick wins. They are hard to implement, easy to attack, and difficult to explain in a 30-second ad. But they are the only way forward if we want durable progress, progress that can’t be undone with a pen stroke or a midterm wave.
“Systems over Chaos” asks: what’s the engine behind this problem, and how do we rebuild it to run in the service of justice and equality, not just power?
What Is Systems Over Chaos?
I picked the name for my Substack account very consciously. I wanted a snappy phrase that embodied what I believe is wrong with the world, and the path to what I believe is the solution to these problems.
I’m historically literate enough to acknowledge two large caveats to the kind of political philosophy that I’m advocating for.
The first caveat is that no political system, no matter how well-designed, can perfectly resist decay. History shows us that even the most idealistic institutions eventually face crises, corruption, or collapse. Systems Over Chaos isn’t an attempt to engineer utopia or freeze progress in a fixed structure. It’s closer to what the framers of the U.S. Constitution imagined: a system capable of self-correction, a more perfect union, not a perfect one. The goal isn’t permanence, but adaptability. It’s about building political and economic frameworks that can learn from failure, absorb new challenges, and still uphold their core values over time.
The second caveat is that the kind of reform I’m advocating for could easily be mistaken for technocracy, an imposition on individual liberty in the name of a more “just” or “equal” system, justified because it’s “backed by evidence.” I disagree with this interpretation for a few reasons.
First, the reforms I support require democratic participation, not just as a legitimizing step, but as a fundamental condition of success. These systems cannot function without public buy-in, deliberation, and accountability. (I’ll be writing more about this on Thursday.)
Second, Systems Over Chaos doesn’t reject freedom, it asks us to define it more clearly. Freedom isn’t just the absence of interference; it’s the presence of real power over your life. A society in which your options are determined by inherited wealth, monopolistic markets, or crumbling infrastructure isn’t free in any meaningful sense. If liberty is a value we choose as a society, through democratic consensus, then the system should be built to maximize it for the many, not just preserve it for the few.
In short, structure is not the enemy of liberty. It’s the condition that makes liberty real.
With what Systems Over Chaos isn’t out of the way, let’s talk about what it is.
There is a fundamental problem in political society today: chaos. Culture wars dominate the headlines while elected officials debate Band-Aid fixes, and populist figureheads profit from legislative dysfunction. Think about it—have we truly resolved any major political issue in the last ten years?
The last nationally transformative legal change that has endured was Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, which legalized same-sex marriage. That was a decade ago. Since then, we’ve been stuck in a cycle, revisiting the same unresolved issues: gun control, climate policy, immigration, healthcare, housing, policing, trans rights, international conflict, taxation, and budgeting. The list hasn’t changed, just the volume and vitriol.
This stagnation stands in contrast to earlier periods of reform. The New Deal and Great Society fundamentally restructured the American social contract. Environmental laws passed under Nixon and Carter, like the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the establishment of the EPA, created durable change. These weren’t just ideological wins; they were structural reforms that redefined the baseline for decades.
By contrast, in the post-Obama era, structural reform has been systematically blocked. After Citizens United, which opened the floodgates to unlimited corporate and dark money in politics, Republican lawmakers hardened against any substantial legislation. Even Obama’s signature achievement, the Affordable Care Act, was a heavily compromised bill. While it expanded Medicaid and created insurance exchanges, it stopped short of any direct challenge to the private healthcare industry. There was no public option, no price controls, and little cost containment.
The ACA wasn’t a visionary transformation, it was a defensive maneuver, a technocratic patch on a system in collapse. And even that was mostly dismantled during the Trump administration. The result is not progress, but managed decline: policy constrained by donor interests, stripped of ambition, and designed to avoid upsetting entrenched power.
Systems Over Chaos is built on the belief that thoughtful, evidence-backed, and democratically-legitimated systems can restore the power of collective self-governance. That doesn’t mean top-down mandates or five-year plans from a central committee. It means using the state as a tool to steer the market toward outcomes that align with our values, justice, sustainability, and equality, rather than outcomes that enrich a tiny elite.
Think about land value tax: it doesn’t ban speculation outright, but it rewires incentives so that hoarding land for profit becomes unappealing, and productive use of land becomes the rational choice. Think about publicly owned broadband: not a command economy, but a way of ensuring a basic service exists without relying on Comcast’s bottom line. Think about market socialism: retaining the efficiency of markets while democratizing ownership, investing in cooperatives, public banks, and social housing to give people more real freedom in their lives.
This is not about replacing capitalism with central planning. It’s about replacing chaotic capitalism with rational socialization. It’s about building systems where outcomes don’t depend on who your parents are or how much your rent goes up this year. It’s about creating structures that let us debate values without getting stuck in a mud pit of bad incentives and structural sabotage.
In short, Systems Over Chaos is a vision for rebuilding our political economy around long-term planning, public accountability, and a moral commitment to fairness. The details may vary, the policies may shift, but the principle is constant: if you want freedom, build the system that makes it possible.
The Politics of Consistency
Systems Over Chaos is, at its core, a “politics of consistency.” This means leading with solid moral principles and working to achieve those outcomes to the best of your ability. It means putting aside culture war BS and campaigning on genuine desire to improve the lives of the people you represent.
This might seem idealistic and impractical, but our current media ecosystem already advantages people who fit the bill: Mamdani won the NYC primary off of a genuine message of change and equitability (though not in as many words). Bernie and AOC are receiving increasing mainstream attention for their Fight Oligarchy rallies. These are not technocratic, neoliberal, and milquetoast candidates, they lead by their message of change and upheaval of the new order.
A core facet of the ideologies of the past (see my article There is no Turning Back for more) was a betrayal of ideals for practicality. No, Obama can’t close Guantanamo because he don’t want the optics of being “weak on terrorism,” but social media, for all its faults, is a democratizing force for mainstream news. And it can enable decision makers to thrive by connecting with people over their vision, despite practical limitations.
But the flip side is this: inconsistency costs more than ever. Consider the backlash AOC received when she voted against an amendment from Marjorie Taylor Greene that would have cut U.S. funding for the Iron Dome. AOC defended her vote online, but many saw it as moral waffling, especially given her past statements on Palestine. She lost credibility, not because she wasn’t strategic enough, but because she didn’t seem consistent. Meanwhile, Rep. Ilhan Omar, who voted in line with her values, retained support.
The lesson is simple: being ideological isn’t a liability any more, it’s a strength. A principled left, rooted in clear values and consistent action, has more to gain from idealism than from compromise. Systems Over Chaos argues that we shouldn’t fear the politics of consistency. We should embrace it.
Lead With the End in Mind
I’m not naive; I know a lot of the problems with implementing this kind of change come from institutional opposition. To oppose any entrenched interest while championing meaningful reform is difficult, sometimes it feels impossible. Systems Over Chaos has a solution to this too: be intentional with what kind of outcomes are desirable, and negotiate without compromising on the ends to achieve them.
This is what I call the backward-mapping approach: starting from the world we want, and working backward to build it.
Begin with your outcomes: universal dignity, broad participation, equal opportunity. These aren’t just lofty values; they’re benchmarks. Then ask: What structural barriers are standing in the way of these outcomes? If the criminal justice system strips dignity, if voting laws block participation, if education and housing policy entrench inequality, then those are the places to start.
The key is reforming systems so that they naturally tend toward justice, rather than requiring constant outside correction. Instead of building policies that react to harm after it happens, like sending more cops after a shooting, or slapping on term limits because comprehensive change is hard, this method creates feedback loops that prevent harm and encourage participation in the first place.
In other words, stop pouring water on the smoke and fix the damn wiring.
Systems Over Chaos is about building a world where the structures work, where justice is the default, not the exception. It’s not enough to react to chaos, we need to build systems that make chaos less likely in the first place.
Policy Applications
I’ve talked a lot of generalities of what Systems Over Chaos means in principle, but not in practice. Therefore, I want to spend some time talking about three core areas Systems Over Chaos could be best applied: Democracy, Justice, and Economy.
Democracy
A lot has been said about passing some form of congressional term limit, and to a large extent I believe this is because it falls into the sweet spot for entrenched interests: different enough to capture the debate over institutional reform, but not different enough to energize public support, so the idea languishes in the proverbial Congressional Hell.
Elections are meant to be a mechanism of accountability and participation. This means to maintain a corrective incentive structure, we need to prioritize public buy-in to the democratic process, and to make the consequences of bad policy serious: electoral loss. If these two pillars are achieved, then term limits would be unnecessary because we can be assured that any candidate who continuously occupies their office truly represents the common interest of their constituency.
Just a couple policy changes that could start this realignment:
Lowering the voting age to 16
Universal Ranked Choice Voting
Voting holidays
Public election financing
Proportional multi-member districts
I’ll speak more about the specifics of this suite of policies (and how they align with Systems ideology) next Sunday.
Justice
Our justice system has been deeply broken for decades. Currently, there are thousands of people still languishing in prison for low level drug offenses. Civil liberties are frequently trampled, and have most recently been the focus of the Black Lives Matter Movement, to limited success.
Our justice system is not supposed to treat conviction as the goal, it’s meant to uphold equal justice in front of the law for everyone, no matter race or income. This means to have a corrective structure, we need to start holding people personally accountable for violations of civil liberties, by functionally ending qualified immunity, and codifying civil liberties within booking procedure, like removing bail. If these reforms are achieved, then the police will have to face real consequences for their abuses, and the public will have invested trust in protecting a reformed justice system.
Just a couple other policy changes that could start this realignment:
No charge-stacking post-booking
Independent investigative bodies for police abuse
Community policing
Create firewalls between prosecution and arrest
Prohibit political endorsements between agencies
Decriminalize poverty
I’ll speak more about the specifics of this suite of policies (and how they align with Systems ideology) the Sunday after my Democracy piece.
Economy & Development
Our economic and developmental system is broken. Our infrastructure is failing while Silicon Valley firms build bigger and bigger data centers at the public’s dime. Our natural resources are being swallowed whole by private corporations, and the American people receive no benefit; the price of gas, eggs, and housing creeps ever higher.
Our economy ought to work for the people. If the people who do the work that makes the economy run are not being included in the development and improvement of the American economy, then that development can never last. Long-term broad-based prosperity will always be more effective at growing an economy than concentrating wealth in the 1%. The only problem is how to get people reinvested in the economy and their community.
Just a couple other policy changes that could start this realignment:
Land Value Tax
Universal Basic Income
Universal Healthcare
Co-Op Credit Unions
Worker buyout options
Carbon tax
I’ll speak more about the specifics of this suite of policies (and how they align with Systems ideology) the Sunday after my Liberty piece.
Durability and Direction
What sets Systems Over Chaos apart isn’t just the kinds of policies it champions, but the kind of change it believes in. Real change isn’t about passing something flashy that dies the next election cycle. It’s about making the system itself resilient to regression. Durable. Rooted. Self-reinforcing.
When we build systems with accountability baked in, like automatic voter registration or ranked choice voting, we’re not just changing policy, we’re shifting incentives. We’re not relying on the perfect politician to do the right thing, we’re making it easier to do right than to do wrong. That’s how we lock in justice. That’s what structural reform means.
But durability isn’t enough. Direction matters too.
Too often, politics is treated like a balancing act between left and right, as if justice lies somewhere in the middle of oppression and freedom. Systems Over Chaos rejects this false neutrality. It believes governance should be directional: always bending institutions toward liberty, equality, and dignity. Not technocracy for its own sake, but moral clarity backed by structural integrity.
That’s the core difference between Systems Over Chaos and a reactive or incrementalist approach. We’re not just patching holes in a sinking ship, we’re redesigning it to sail somewhere better.
Slogan to Strategy
We don’t just need a new driver, we need to fix the machine.
Swapping leaders, rebranding agendas, or tweeting louder than the next faction won't save us from systemic collapse. The chaos we face isn’t random, it’s the logical result of design choices made decades ago. Systems over Chaos is the recognition that the only way out is through: through structure, through institutions, through realignment.
This moment demands a new political imagination, one bold enough to restructure society at the root. To create feedback loops that correct injustice. To design institutions that expand human flourishing. To treat politics as architecture.
Systems thinking is the antidote to performative politics. It’s not neutral. It’s not moderate. It’s directionally radical, toward justice, equality, and liberty. It’s not about fixing the margins, it’s about rebalancing the incentives that govern how power operates in the first place.
We don’t have to accept brokenness as inevitable.
We can build structures that heal, rather than harm.
We can stop fighting the symptoms. Let’s build something better.
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Systems Over Chaos is a political writing project built around one idea: structure is not the enemy of liberty, it’s what makes it real. Each post breaks down the systemic roots of today’s dysfunctions and lays out bold, practical reforms to build a freer, fairer society. Subscribe to go beyond vibes and fight for a better-designed world