1 September 2025
Woodrow Wilson, 1908:
“government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life. No living thing can have its organs offset against each other as checks, and live. On the contrary, its life is dependent upon their quick cooperation, their ready response to the commands of instinct or intelligence, their amicable community of purpose. Government is not a body of blind forces; it is a body of men, with highly differentiated functions, no doubt, in our modern day of specialization, but with a common task and purpose. Their cooperation is indispensable, their warfare fatal. There can be no successful government without leadership or without the intimate, almost instinctive, coordination of the organs of life and action. This is not theory, but fact, and displays its force as fact, whatever theories may be thrown across its track. Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice.” - Woodrow Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908), 54–62, via Morgan Housel, Accountable to Darwin vs. Accountable to Newton.
I like it. Newton: predictable systems because they follow unchanging rules, like the law of gravity. Darwin: evolving systems, reacting over time to their environment.
But it feels incomplete?
Particularly now we’re in an era of predictable organisations becoming probabilistic ones as they add AI. The organisation must now be partly accountable to the randomness of the black box.
So a 3rd pole in this model might look to systems and unpredictability. Stafford Beer: self-regulating, recursive networks of communication, viable only through feedback, learning, and the constant regulation of complexity. Feedback loops, incentives, people, unpredictability. The purpose of a system… is what it does.
But instead I’ll look to Octavia Butler to add a little literary spice to this model. Butler’s Parable of the Sower 1993 and Parable of the Talents 1998 are about the fragility of systems, difference, the reality of survival and growth, the ground truth of change (“god is change”) and - once you’ve accepted it - the agency that brings. Being shaped by it, but also shaping it.
The other way Newton/Darwin feels incomplete is that in large, complex systems it’s usually not “or”. It’s usually “and”.
So jumping back to Woodrow Wilson and government: as a Newtonian machine, government values design. As a Darwinian organism, government values survival. As a Butlerian system, government values viability. All three are true, yet none are sufficient on their own.