Equilibrium seeking¶

Lord Vetinari had a gift for making revolution feel impolite.

It wasn’t that he banned it, you understand. That would be crude. Rather, the city had developed what he called ‘institutional antibodies’. Propose radical reform of the Watch, and suddenly the Seamstresses’ Guild needed urgent consultation. Suggest restructuring the Guilds entirely, and seventeen sub-committees would materialise overnight, each requiring proper minutes and a representative from the Bakers.

The system didn’t resist through malice. It resisted the way a body resists a foreign object, automatically and without conscious thought. By the time your revolutionary proposal had been ‘properly considered’, factoring in the concerns of the Guild of Merchants, the Beggars’ Guild’s jurisdictional boundaries, historical precedent dating back to the reign of Lorenzo the Kind (whose nickname was ironic), and the need for a six-month feasibility study, the revolutionary moment had passed.

Usually around the same time the revolutionary went home for dinner.

“The genius,” Vetinari once remarked to Drumknott, “is that no one is actually stopping them. They’re simply being helped to consider all the relevant factors.”

Drumknott, who had once watched a proposal for affordable housing spend eighteen months in committee before emerging as a paper on optimal brick taxation, nodded. “Quite so, sir.”

The beautiful thing about equilibrium is that it seeks itself. You don’t need conspiracy. You just need sufficient complexity, enough stakeholders, and a general agreement that sudden movements might upset the apple cart. Never mind that the apples are mostly rotten. They’re arranged rotten apples, and arrangement is nine-tenths of civilisation.

On his desk, Vetinari kept a small pendulum. It swung back and forth, back and forth, never quite stopping but never really going anywhere either. He found it soothing.