Why Destruction Often Has the Advantage

I have often been troubled by a familiar question. Why do people who respect rules, accept responsibility, and try to maintain a common order so often seem to gain less than those who exploit loopholes, evade responsibility, or simply damage the rules? Why can a decent and conscientious person appear slow and constrained, while someone willing to abandon restraint obtains power, wealth, or influence more quickly?

This looks at first like a moral question. Yet morality alone does not seem sufficient to explain it. From the standpoint of Sustenesis Theory, it may point to a more general asymmetry within structures themselves. To maintain a structure requires continuous input. It needs attention, energy, coordination, memory, repair, trust, and rules that are actually enforced. Destruction is often cheaper. It may require only one refusal to cooperate, one breach of trust, one evasion of responsibility, or one forceful act at a vulnerable point.

A bridge is built through the coordinated work of many people over time, but it can be damaged by a small number of failures. A friendship requires patience, mutual restraint, and repeated adjustment, but a single betrayal may ruin it. A legal system depends on countless people following procedures, accepting limits, and believing that rules apply to others as well as to themselves. Once enough people conclude that rules are burdens only for the obedient, the system begins to weaken from within.

Human beings are discrete biological individuals, each with immediate interests, fears, desires, and limited capacities. Yet human life is also irreducibly social. We live through families, communities, institutions, languages, markets, legal systems, and shared forms of knowledge. These do not persist simply because people agree. They require differences to be held within workable limits, responsibilities to be distributed, violations to have consequences, and the whole structure to retain the capacity to correct itself under pressure. In the language of Sustenesis Theory, a viable social order depends on constrained and sustained coherence.

This gives a more precise meaning to what is loosely called the “bad person” phenomenon. It is not that every successful person is bad, nor that every act of maintenance is morally good. Some highly stable structures are unjust, oppressive, or parasitic, and they should be changed. The narrower point is this: where constraints are weak, selective, or easily bypassed, those who reduce their own maintenance costs can gain a short-term advantage. They take benefits while shifting risks onto others. They use public rules while privately evading them. They may damage trust while continuing to rely on the trust that others still provide.

The advantage, in such cases, is often not created by superior ability alone. It comes from a difference in parameter sensitivity. Someone who remains sensitive to fairness, responsibility, truthfulness, long-term trust, and institutional consequences bears more costs. Someone less sensitive to those parameters may move faster in the short term. But that gain is often obtained by drawing down the conditions that make stable cooperation possible.

The same pattern is especially visible in workplaces, departments, and small organisations. Many people have seen conscientious and capable staff members receive less recognition than those who flatter superiors, anticipate personal preferences, claim credit, shift risk, or create divisions among colleagues. Such people can appear more “reliable” or more deserving of promotion, even when they contribute less to the organisation’s real capacity to function.

This pattern should not be treated as peculiar to authoritarian states or to societies commonly described as non-democratic. It can be found in private companies, public institutions, and government departments in democratic countries as well. My own experience of working over many years in Australia, across both private and public settings, has made this difficult to ignore. I do not offer that experience as a statistical conclusion, but it has repeatedly shown me that people skilled at personal alignment, self-protection, and the management of appearances can obtain an advantage in either sector. Democratic culture and institutions can provide important protections: legal accountability, transparency, procedural safeguards, independent scrutiny, and a greater capacity to challenge abuses of power. But they do not, by themselves, remove the structural incentives that arise wherever people compete for position, recognition, security, and control.

For that reason, I am more inclined to see this as a deeper organisational problem than as a simple contrast between democratic and authoritarian systems. Different political systems alter the scale of the problem, the available remedies, and the cost of resistance. They do not automatically abolish the short-term advantage that can arise when a person shifts maintenance costs onto others and converts personal loyalty into a source of power.

This does not necessarily mean that leaders cannot see what they are doing. Many leaders can see it, at least in part. The deeper issue may be that power has an internal tendency to favour people who reduce its immediate costs of control and strengthen personal dependence. An independent subordinate with professional judgement and a commitment to procedure may raise objections, insist that rules apply consistently, and place the organisation’s long-term interests above personal convenience. For the organisation, this is often a strength. Within a narrow logic of personal power, however, it can be inconvenient.

A more dependent subordinate may offer a leader a shorter and more direct chain of command. Someone who is unquestioningly obedient upward, forceful downward, willing to handle ambiguous matters, and skilled at performing loyalty can provide a quick sense of control. Promoting such people is therefore not always a simple error of judgement. It can be a rational choice within a limited power logic. When reward and punishment are tied to private loyalty, others become less certain of their position and more dependent on the centre of power.

Yet the stability produced in this way is fragile. It rests on personal relations, selective incentives, restricted information, and fear of exclusion rather than on institutional trust and shared standards. Energy that should sustain the organisation as a whole is gradually redirected toward sustaining a local concentration of power. Professional competence, procedural fairness, truthful feedback, and mutual trust are weakened. The organisation may look more orderly and obedient on the surface, but its capacity for self-correction is declining.

Eventually, capable people become silent, leave, or retreat into minimal compliance. Those who remain become increasingly skilled at displaying loyalty and avoiding responsibility. The organisation may still appear disciplined while losing the ability to recognise reality, correct mistakes, or handle complex work. What is rewarded is no longer the capacity to sustain the whole structure, but the capacity to survive within a distorted local structure.

This may also explain why societies and institutions often deteriorate slowly and then break suddenly. Small acts of evasion, corruption, irresponsibility, and distrust can seem manageable when taken separately. Yet their cumulative effect is to reduce the system’s ability to sustain coherence. At a certain point, the remaining structure can no longer absorb the accumulated pressure. What follows may be crisis, collapse, or violent reorganisation. A new order is then built, often at great cost, and the cycle begins again.

History therefore appears to advance through jumps. One regime falls and another is founded; one institutional arrangement decays and another replaces it. But most of the process takes place in the long middle period, when the existing structure is gradually being exhausted. What later looks like a sudden historical rupture may have been prepared by years or decades of unnoticed dissipation.

Several established traditions have recognised parts of this problem. Machiavelli understood that political competition can reward those willing to act outside ordinary moral limits, though The Prince largely describes rather than explains this logic. Hobbes saw the need for a common power capable of restraining conflict, but did not fully address why maintaining common restraint is so difficult while its breakdown can be so rapid. Evolutionary theory and game theory explain much about the vulnerability of cooperation when individuals can take benefits without contributing their share. Mancur Olson’s account of institutional sclerosis is particularly close to this concern: stable societies can accumulate organised interests that protect their own gains while imposing wider costs and weakening the system’s capacity for renewal. Schumpeter’s idea of creative destruction, and complex-systems concepts such as dissipation and phase transition, offer other partial insights.

The tentative ambition of Sustenesis Theory is neither to deny these theories nor to rename them. It is to ask whether they can be understood through a more elementary structural condition: difference is unavoidable, constraint is necessary, and coherence must be continuously sustained if a structure is to remain viable. The point is not that all structures should be preserved. It is that every serious transformation must confront the question of what will sustain the new structure after the old one has been broken.

If this line of thought has value, it may provide a common frame for political order, economic cooperation, morality, knowledge, and life itself. A society survives not because conflict disappears, but because conflict can be contained, processed, and corrected without destroying the conditions of coexistence. Knowledge survives not because every belief is final, but because claims can be preserved, tested, revised, and made effective within stable constraints. Moral conduct may likewise be understood as a willingness to bear part of the cost of maintaining structures that no individual can sustain alone.

But this remains a hypothesis rather than a conclusion. Its value will depend on whether it can make clearer distinctions, explain cases that existing theories leave apart, and generate claims that can be examined rather than merely admired. It must also distinguish necessary maintenance from the preservation of injustice, and genuine renewal from mere destruction.

The question, then, may not simply be why bad people sometimes succeed. A deeper question is why the costs of sustaining a shared world are distributed so unevenly, while the gains from weakening it can be captured so quickly. If Sustenesis Theory can help clarify that asymmetry, it may offer a useful perspective on one of the oldest and most persistent difficulties of human life.