What is the Center?

Why democracy collapses without a shared reality—and how to hold the center without force

Photo by Leonardo Iheme on Unsplash

Some people are wired to crave stability. Others are wired to demand change. Neither impulse is wrong. The question is whether we can build systems that honor both.

This isn’t a new problem. It’s the fundamental tension of human social existence: how do we preserve enough continuity that people can orient themselves, pass something meaningful to their children, feel connected to something larger than themselves—while also adapting to new realities, correcting inherited injustices, making room for those who were excluded?

Every functional society has to answer this question. And for a while, liberal democracies had a pretty good answer: constitutional frameworks that allow the cultural frontier to move through democratic persuasion rather than through force. Institutions that manage change without chaos. Processes that respect both the need for stability and the inevitability of evolution.

That framework is collapsing. Not because the philosophy was wrong, but because the epistemic conditions it requires have been systematically destroyed.

Let me explain what I mean by starting with the psychology underneath our politics.