We normally think of phase shift as transition from one stable state to another. But what of the transition from stable to unstable. Many phase shifts are sudden, quantum or just very fast, such as water molecules turning to ice crystals. But for someone who has lived through a political revolution can tell you, the unstable state can sometimes last longer that one would like. Nevertheless, unstable states tend toward stable states, almost by definition. An unstable state that lasted for a million years would sound like an oxymoron, or a contradiction in terms.
We tend to equate unstable with undesirable. Certainly political revolutions and physical explosions, for example, have their downsides. Nevertheless, stable states by themselves do not indicate a “higher” value than unstable. Slavery, for example, was a stable state for thousands of years in the history of humanity; and there were aspects of slavery that worked well, in system-wide terms; otherwise it wouldn’t have been stable. If we are looking at stable states as “stuck” states, as in the case of slavery, we must look at what is the glue that keeps the state stable, as a system, and not just “one part of the system vs. another”. In a stable state there is no such thing as one part of the system vs. another.
In the case of slavery, for example, we must ask, not why was it “good” for slaves – because in very obvious ways it was not. We must rather ask, what was it that provided some advantage for each component of the system and for the system as a whole, which kept it stable. Stability by its nature implies and requires that there is an interest and a stake for all parts and for the system as a whole, otherwise the state, by definition, is not stable.
For example, it is said that ancient Sparta was comprised of 90% slave and 10% free. How is this possible, you might ask. Could 1 person in a room of 10 people dominate the other 9 for several hundred years? There must have been some advantage for the other 9 over some unstable state. That is not to say over some other stable state. That is a different question. Stable states are not adjacent to one another, as water is not adjacent to steam; there is an unstable state in between. Therefore, in the case of slavery, the slaves (as well as the slave masters) did not really have access to comparing one stable state to another, in order to chose. And this is an unavoidable dilemma in the matter of state change – that to go from one stable state to some “more desirable” state, there must be an unstable state in between, and therefore experientially, the comparison is between the current stable state, and the adjacent unstable state.
What might be the system-wide advantage of slavery in ancient Sparta that would keep the system glued together? Consider, for example, someone living in a small “apartment” in Downtown Sparta. Such apartments consisted of basically four walls enclosing say 150 square feet, a door and a window, and some crude furniture. Let us say that for the total number of people living in Sparta to live in such housing, would require 10 people living in such a space. Would the owner of the house in this very patriarchal society tolerate 9 other people cluttering up his space? Probably not. But if those people represented wealth, instead of clutter, then he would be much more likely to accept so many people in so small a space. (I’m making up these numbers.) Likewise, in terms of expense to feed all of these people, the head of the household could calculate fairly reliably how much service or income that he would receive from how many mouths that he had to feed, and plan the size of his household accordingly. For the slaves, on the other hand, what kept it together, besides the use of force (which alone not have the capacity to keep systems stable) was that there was access to having a roof over their heads, food, and a defined place in society.
This line of reasoning opens up a huge inquiry into looking at history from the model of state change, one which we shall be diving into in future posts.
