Perverse Stability vs. Authentic Peace
We’ve grown so accustomed to equating silence with peace that we overlook the heavy toll it exacts.
In our closest relationships, skipping hard conversations spares us momentary friction but stores up pressure until something finally snaps—communication breakdown plays a role in roughly seventy percent of divorces, a stark reminder that unvoiced grievances don’t vanish but compound into a silent debit that eventually detonates.
At work, glossy post-mortems and staged celebrations fill meeting agendas even as engagement hovers at just twenty-one percent globally. Behind the applause, employees siphon frustration into private chats and late-night emails, only to unleash it later in sudden resignations or whispered accusations that force costly reorganizations.
And when entire societies slip into this pattern, the consequences can be catastrophic. Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in Tunisia in December 2010 wasn’t merely an act of despair but a refusal to continue financing the silence ledger—and within weeks, the façade of calm cracked, toppling a regime.
This brittle quiet isn’t peace but what I call perverse stability: every concession, every withheld concern, carries invisible interest.
Johan Galtung’s distinction between negative peace—the mere absence of overt violence—and positive peace—equitable structures that address root grievances—helps us see how order can be sustained through coercion instead of justice. Negative peace merely fences in resentments; true resilience requires moving beyond containment.
Feminist scholars remind us that the unpaid labor of care and dissent is itself a political force: when those tasks go unrecognized, the very bonds they’re meant to hold together turn brittle, leaving no recourse but rupture.
Authentic peace, by contrast, treats tension not as failure but as fuel for connection. It begins when we surface small ruptures—the whispered concerns, the gentle complaints—and treat them as early alarms rather than nuisances to sweep aside. In The Amnesia Engine I showed how honoring early warnings averts disaster: sidelined signals become catastrophes only when they’re ignored. It deepens when we count, share, and reciprocate the emotional work required to speak up and listen—rather than expecting individuals to bear it alone.
And it endures when institutions lock in structures—rotating decision-rights, transparent budgets, protected feedback channels—that turn dissent into design, ensuring every voice can register without fear of reprisal.
Settling for perverse stability produces predictable pathologies. Honest critique is branded “troublemaking,” forcing people into perpetual self-surveillance and chronic anxiety. Rituals of harmony calcify into echo chambers where real problems go unflagged, leaving no reservoir of trust when crisis arrives. The quieter we stay, the harder—and more violent—the eventual rupture.
By contrast, a system that rewards early critique builds a reservoir of trust so that disagreements sharpen rather than shatter the whole. Embedding feedback loops that reward rupture—rather than penalize it—is a design imperative I unpacked in Emergence Is an Excuse, and it transforms conflict from a hazard into an asset.
Practically, this means declaring our full selves non-negotiable. We must map the unwritten agreements we’ve tacitly accepted and refuse to subsidize others’ calm with our silence. Naming and distributing emotional labor turns an invisible burden into a shared responsibility, while open-book governance and rotating authority dismantle entrenched hierarchies. Confessing uncertainty as readily as conviction normalizes vulnerability, and repeating hard truths becomes our strongest defense against institutional amnesia, as I argued in Say It Again Anyway.
True peace costs short-term discomfort but returns durable trust, collective agency, and an enduring capacity to adapt.
Ungovernability isn’t chaos; it’s the choice to refuse the hidden bargain that perverse stability demands.
Speak the truths you’ve parked too long, insist on structures that honor every voice, and let the only stability worth having be one we build together—no concessions, no suppressed voices, no debts unpaid.