Equilibration of Social Conflict
Equilibration is an explanatory model of development, which integrates both poles of human and societal adaptation, and as such, it is an advancement beyond the twin centrations of political thought in which conservatives emphasize the preservation and use of institutional forms and individual abilities, or in which progressives emphasize environmental and social concerns and equalization of differences. Today’s political battles often look like this fight between two sides—conservatives and progressives—each trying to push policies, win elections, above all to gain power and thereby stop the other. We see this in debates over climate change, policing, immigration, education, markets, including the role of government itself. But what if these conflicts aren’t just struggles for power? What if they are signals that something deeper is going on—an imbalance in how our society is organized and how it adapts?
Equilibration provides an advanced method for understanding social and individual conflict. Rather than seeing issues as a war between sides, equilibration theory suggests we view each side as part of an ongoing, cyclical process by which societies or individuals adjust to new challenges, repair and construct compensations for imbalances, and develop new ways of working together. Equilibration appears to be closely tied to the tendency of human activity toward cooperation, mutual respect, and inclusive values such as free speech, property rights, and so on.
What Is Equilibration?
Equilibration is an explanatory framework from developmental science. It describes how living systems—like individuals or societies—grow and improve by cycling through attempts to understand and adjust to challenges and issues. This cycling activity produces stages of understanding and application as it organizes its methods of understanding and the accommodations imposed on it by the situations and issues of the social and material environments.
This problem-solving cycling includes refining the identification of the problem, experimenting with refined methods to record better facts and responses, using that feedback to refine the explanations attributed to the problem, reflection on the cycle to abstract implicit methods of organizing thought and so on. This explanation of development as equilibration cycles of problem-solving resists the various forms of reductionism—development as an additive process produced by active social engineering or hereditarily fixed, innate capabilities used to accumulate additional experiences, etc. Development is not a simple back-and-forth debate. It’s a dynamic cycling of problem-solving activities organized to bring some kind of closure or future ‘answer’ to the situational and institutional factors so as to integrate them into an overarching system.
Each instance of activity in the cycle consists of the assimilation of the situation and its accommodations; these accommodations express the current form of observations and facts at some level of their development. Hence, each step in the cycle triggers or leads to the next. If we represent these assimilatory activities as A, B, C, and so on, and if we call the parts of the environmental social/material situations A’, B’ C, and so forth, the cycling of the systems of the human subject conducting the activity appears as a cycle:
(A x A’) —> (B x B’) —> (C x C’) …—> (Z x Z’)
Figure 1: Cycles of Societal and Individual Equilibration of Institutional and Cognitive Systems
Why Conservatives and Progressives Both Matter
From this point of view, conservatives and progressives represent different poles of the adaptation of the societal and individual subject to the environments to which they are accommodated. Thus, they see things quite differently and use different problem-solving cycles. Conservatives focus on the internal structures of society—its traditions, institutions, and norms. Progressives focus on external conditions—unfairness, exclusion, or environmental harm. But history shows how these come to be integrated in each step of societal and individual development.
Both sides are reacting to what they see as the real aspects of imbalance. And both are necessary to equilibration. Without conserving its structures and personalities, societies and individuals lose their coherence and methods of adaptation. Without progressive responsiveness to new conditions and challenges, they stagnate and lapse into stasis. Development depends on the ability to integrate both sides, the conservative structures and progressive social/material concerns, into a more effective cycles of adaptation.
But note also that the structures used in problem-solving cycles may not necessarily develop but may simply repeat their original forms. The study of why development does not occur is as important as why it does develop to overtake and transcend its previous forms.
Why It’s Hard for Ordinary Citizens to Engage
Most people are busy with their lives—working, raising families, and managing practical needs. They don’t have time or tools for deep political analysis. And they’re not expected to. Equilibration is a complex process, one that takes sustained investigation, reflection, and conceptual reorganization. That’s why it often happens among institutions, thinkers, or communities dedicated to that kind of work.
But even if people don’t engage directly in these cycles, they live inside the systems affected by them—schools, healthcare, laws, and communities. The success or failure of those systems in rebalancing themselves affects everyone, and serious problem-solving may be triggered, or the systems remain complacent, simply repeating its existing forms of adaptation.
The Initial Question: How Developed Is the Thinking?
Rather than asking which side is “right,” we should ask: How well-developed is the thinking on each side? Are these views primitive, and are they stuck in rigid, reactionary forms—or are they part of an active, open-ended cycle of adaptation and learning? At birth the cycles operate vigorously; they develop rapidly but at some point, development ceases among people, and the result is we have undeveloped, old children who appear unable to engage in constructive, cooperative problem-solving cycles in response to challenges to their form of adaptation.
Some political thinking—on either side—is immature, simplistic, or emotionally driven, which appears as childish activity. But other forms are more advanced, using evidence, critical reasoning, and cooperation to address real problems. Equilibration helps us understand not just the differences in belief, but the developmental levels of thought behind them and what is driving their change and improvement.
Understanding What Helps or Blocks Societal Development
As we begin to understand processes and mechanisms of equilibration that drive development, we see that not all systems are equally open to new learning, development, and adaptation.
Figure 2: Some Obvious Positive and Blocking Factors in Societal Equilibration
