Why Rules-Based Orders Fail
For a brief period after the Cold War, Americans persuaded themselves that the liberal order had become self-sustaining. And yet, any rules-based system elaborate enough to govern and interpret its own operations will eventually confront questions that its rules cannot answer.
Originally published at Project Syndicate
Benn Steil CFR Expert - Senior Fellow and Director of International Economics
NEW YORK—In 1980, Douglas Hofstadter, an obscure young computer science professor at Indiana University, won a Pulitzer Prize for his first book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Equal parts brain-straining, witty, and epiphanic, “GEB”—as its devotees call it—leveraged math, art, and music to illuminate a remarkable feature of reality. Though systems may appear solid and self-sustaining, they also may contain contradictions that they can never resolve from within.
Consciousness itself is such a system, Hofstadter argued. My brain constructs symbolic representations of the world, and among those symbols is a model of my brain as “myself.” But “I” am not an entity apart from my brain. The idea of “me” emerges from my own brain’s recursive symbolic activity. The self is both real and illusory: a stable experience generated by a process that can never fully explain itself.
This recursive structure, Hofstadter showed, is a source of human creativity and self-awareness. But it can also produce paralysis or collapse. I may fear something, observe that I am fearful, fear that my fearfulness is weakness, and fear that others may disdain me for it. In this case, I will have become trapped in a recursive loop in which my consciousness destabilizes my action.
Can political orders fall into the same pattern? I believe that they can and often do.
