Society Goes Through Phases
Gradients, not narratives
This is observation, not justification. To explain the physics is not to excuse the outcome.
Written in early 2026, during a period of visible political and social instability in the United States.
Things in society are shaking right now. Especially in the United States. You might be wondering what is happening.
The short answer: no, everything is not going to hell, and we will get out of this trap eventually. It is a societal cycle observed many times over. The Arab philosopher Ibn Khaldun described the rise and fall of civilizations through generational cycles of cohesion and decay. Strauss and Howe mapped similar patterns in American history, identifying recurring turnings every 80 to 100 years. Some people refer to René Girard, whose work on mimetic desire and scapegoating you can read about here.
Society goes through emotions, just like we do. It might be hard to believe, but it is explainable with pure physics. Thermodynamics. It is not just a metaphor. It is really the pressure building up with nowhere to go.
Let me explain with America. But first, let us go through how natural phenomena such as lightning occur.
How Lightning Forms
Thunder (more precisely: lightning, with thunder as its acoustic consequence) happens when negative and positive charges are separated to such a degree that the air between them can no longer withstand the force. The separation creates an enormous electric field. When a critical threshold is crossed, the air can no longer remain insulating. It ruptures. That rupture is the lightning. Thunder is the sound that follows, caused by the air expanding violently after being heated almost instantaneously.
When the imbalance between negative charge at the bottom of the cloud and positive charge on the ground grows large enough, variance in the air increases sharply. Chemically this is described as ionization, but what it means physically is that electrons normally bound to molecules are torn loose and begin to move freely. The air locally stops behaving like an insulator and starts behaving more like a conductor.
This movement is not uniform. Small random differences mean that in some regions electrons move more easily than in others. Where movement is easier, conductivity increases. Where conductivity increases, even more current flows. This creates a positive feedback loop.
Because the cloud is already internally polarized, with regions of high local charge density, lower air density, and partially ionized pockets, this breakdown begins there. Weak, branching conductive paths form and propagate downward. These paths do not yet carry the main discharge. They act as probes, exploring where resistance is lowest.
Near the ground, the electric field becomes extremely concentrated around sharp or elevated objects. Trees, towers, and buildings respond by launching short upward streamers. Most fail. One eventually connects. When that happens, resistance collapses, a single channel locks in, and the accumulated energy is released in a fraction of a second.
Now Look at the United States
Over the past decades, the separation between the top and the bottom has increased dramatically. Since 1980, the share of total wealth held by the top 1% has grown from approximately 25% to over 35%. Today, the top 5% hold more wealth than the bottom 80% combined.
Wealth, mobility, influence, and insulation have concentrated upward, while large parts of the population have become increasingly constrained. This is not just inequality in a moral sense. It is a growing gradient. Energy, economic, psychological, political, accumulates because it cannot dissipate evenly through institutions that once acted as conductors.
People often call the comparison to lightning a metaphor. It is not. It is the same thermodynamic pattern playing out in a different medium.
Leaders emerge not because they carry the energy, but because they can move more easily. They have lower resistance: money, platforms, networks, reach. They branch, probe, and explore paths across cities, counties, and landscapes. Most attempts go nowhere.
Meanwhile, the ground is not passive. Grassroots groups, local organizers, and socially elevated nodes, the equivalent of trees and towers, respond to the growing field. They concentrate pressure locally.
When a probing path from above connects with a primed structure below, resistance collapses. The release looks sudden, but it was prepared over years. What erupts is not created in the moment. It is discharged.
The Pattern
If you look carefully at what happened on January 6th, you can see this structure clearly. A long period of charge separation. Blocked dissipation. Probing leaders. Responsive ground nodes. Followed by a sudden, violent release once a viable path formed.
This is the Girardian pattern: mimetic tension accumulating until it discharges through a scapegoat or an event. It is visible in Ibn Khaldun’s cycles of asabiyyah, the social cohesion that builds and then fractures. It appears in Peter Turchin’s work on secular cycles and elite overproduction.
Or in my own words: the worm shredding. The system twisting under uneven load until structure fails. Societal compression. The off-charge.
Nature does not care about narratives. It cares about gradients. When variance grows too large and small releases are blocked, rupture is not a failure of morality.
It is a property of the system.
The question is not whether the next discharge will come. It is whether we can build systems that allow energy to dissipate before the rupture.