Societal Change × Self-sustaining Systems

Bateson's analysis of schismogenic versus steady-state societies reveals something McHale and Rifkin both circle without quite touching: a self-sustaining system doesn't resist change — it *requires* continuous non-progressive change to maintain balance, the way a person standing still is actually making thousands of micro-adjustments per second. Balinese society sustains itself through "continual nonprogressive change," ceremony and art that burn energy without accumulating toward any threshold. Industrial civilization does the opposite — each homeostatic correction (new profession, new regulation, new technology) becomes load-bearing, and the system grows dependent on the very perturbation it was meant to neutralize, exactly as Bateson showed with Prohibition generating bootleggers the police then needed. Prigogine's dissipative structures formalize the trap: greater complexity demands greater energy throughput, which produces greater entropy, which demands still greater complexity. Societal change, then, is not something that happens *to* self-sustaining systems. It is the exhaust they produce by running.