Minnesota as a Systems Failure

How NGOs process dissent until reality no longer matters

In my upcoming book (preorders open next week), I argue that late-stage empires do not fail because they are weak or poorly intentioned. They fail because they become autopoietic.

Autopoiesis is a term from systems theory. It means this: a system responds to reality only through the constraints of its own internal organization.

You’ve almost certainly encountered autopoietic institutions, even if you didn’t have a name for them:

• A corporation where middle management defines OKRs that have no relationship to customers, yet performance reviews insist everything is “on track.”

• A bureaucracy that measures success by compliance with procedure rather than outcomes.

• A late Soviet state in which leadership was reassured by reports everyone knew were false, but which could no longer be contradicted without threatening the system itself.

Autopoietic systems lose the capacity for the environment to redefine their purpose. Inputs still arrive, but they are reinterpreted until they are compatible with the system’s existing outputs. Feedback loops close. Contradictions are absorbed. External signals stop producing corrective changes in internal behavior.

At that point, the system is no longer adaptive relative to its original purpose. It becomes self-referential. It is capable of internally justified expansion without reference to external success.

That’s a long-winded way to explain that none of these institutions were lying in the usual sense. They were maintaining equilibrium.

This is the key point: autopoiesis becomes pathological when stability is prioritized over external correction.

All long-lasting institutions drift toward it. Systems seek equilibrium and optimize for survival. Over time, survival becomes flattened as preserving internal coherence rather than fulfilling an external purpose. Once that happens, the institution closes itself off from external falsification.

The system no longer asks, Is this true?
It asks, Is this compatible with what we already produce?

The current unrest in Minnesota is an example of an order that has reached equilibrium through mutual dependency between antagonistic subsystems.

After the Cold War, the Western world organized itself around a single moral injunction: Never again. Never again fascism. Never again totalitarianism. Never again a unified ideology capable of subordinating it to a single vision of man.

To prevent another Nazi Germany or another Soviet Union, the post–Cold War order built immunity to totalitarian ideologies.

Grand narratives were treated as dangerous. Politics was re-engineered away from totalizing visions and towards norms and institutional mediation.

For a time, this worked.

But Marxism could not simply vanish in the West. It was too culturally embedded, too intertwined with labor and academia. At the same time, the system could not tolerate permanent insurgency. Thousands of bombings, riots, and underground cells per year were incompatible with stability. That level of disorder threatened the system’s own survival.

An honest reckoning with Marxism as a coherent rival risked reopening the same ideological conflict the post–Cold War order had been designed to avoid.

So, instead of crushing Communist subversives, the system adapted.

Dissent was absorbed into civic infrastructure: NGOs, foundations, advisory boards, grant programs, legal advocacy, compliance regimes, and professionalized activism. Radical energy was translated into careers and metrics.

The result is a structural inversion. The Western order that was constructed to neutralize Communism now depends on its managed presence to generate legitimacy. At the same time, contemporary revolutionary movements depend on the same institutions they once sought to overthrow; for funding, protection, and survival.

I name the two classes of NGOs active in the Western society:

These two ecosystems are not allies in the ideological sense, but nonetheless are functionally co-dependent. The institutional networks require managed dissent to justify their expansion, funding, and moral authority. The revolutionary networks require institutional cover to survive in a system that would otherwise suppress them. Together, they form a closed loop.

This is not hypocrisy alone, nor betrayal alone, nor even corruption alone. It’s systems logic.

The unrest in Minnesota is composed of two interlocking ecosystems with distinct functions and incentives.

Layer One: Institutional Globalist Networks (IGNs)

These organizations stabilize narratives, translate street activity into institutional language, and convert volatility into policy, funding, and legitimacy.

Typical roles:

• Define acceptable moral frames

• Interface with courts, media, platforms, and elected officials

• Absorb risk and liability away from the state

Minnesota examples:

• ACLU of Minnesota: legal framing, evidence intake, civil-rights narrative stabilization

• CAIR-MN: media legitimacy, community spokespersons, civil-rights translation

• ISAIAH / Faith in Minnesota: clergy cover

• Indivisible / 50501 networks: national synchronization, turnout logistics, message discipline

• COPAL (and its Immigrant Defense Network): professionalized “rapid response”

• SEIU locals, MFT teachers’ unions: mass participation with legal insulation

These groups talk about:

democracy, norms, accountability, resilience, community safety

They are structurally incapable of endorsing uncontrolled disruption, and structurally incapable of functioning without it.

Layer Two: State-Integrated Revolutionary Networks (SIRNs)

These organizations operate close to risk. They often receive funding or indirect support from adversarial states such as Venezuela, Iran, or China.

Typical roles:

• Mobilize crowds on short notice

• Escalate confrontation beyond institutional comfort

• Produce activist cadres and political identity

Minnesota examples:

• MIRAC (Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee): street mobilization, mass protest initiation

• Release MN8: deportation resistance

• PACAT (People’s Action Coalition Against Trump): coalition of radical fronts

• PSL (Party for Socialism and Liberation): revolutionary narrative coherence

• Street-medic collectives / mutual aid crews: protest sustainment

These groups talk about:

resistance, abolition, liberation, anti-imperialism

They are structurally incapable of winning durable outcomes alone, and structurally unwilling to dissolve into institutions.

The Coupling Mechanism

These two layers are not allies, but they are not adversaries in the classical sense either.

They form what I call managed antagonism.

• The revolutionary layer produces instability that forces attention.

• The institutional layer prevents that instability from becoming existential.

• The revolutionary layer cannot survive sustained repression.

• The institutional layer cannot justify its expansion without crisis.

Each makes the other necessary.

No conspiracy is needed; every system selects for actors who can survive within this loop.

Why This Is Autopoietic

At no point does the system ask: Is this resolving the underlying conflict?

Instead, it asks:

• Is the protest visible but containable?

• Is the outrage legible to courts and donors?

• Is the escalation high enough to justify funding but low enough to avoid rupture?

• Is dissent radical enough to feel authentic but bounded enough to be processed?

Reality (such as the ICE video that was released today) becomes input, not a corrective signal.

The output is always the same:

• More NGOs

• More taxpayer dollars

• More institutional capture

• More managed disorder

This is equilibrium.

The Terminal Condition

An autopoietic system becomes increasingly fragile because it can no longer correct itself relative to external goals. At its terminal stage:

• It cannot recognize external falsification.

• Contradictory evidence is reclassified until it fits existing narratives.

• It cannot exit its own feedback loops.

And it increasingly trades competence for survival. Truth itself becomes a liability if it threatens institutional coherence.

This is why a single individual with a phone was able to outperform an entire legacy media ecosystem.

Nick Shirley succeeded because he was outside the system.

He could respond directly to reality.

The system could only respond to itself.