I can’t help but notice the word “instability” getting used, in political writing, to refer to widespread and continued lawlessness, violence, rioting, and so on. A “stable” society is one where these things don’t occur, or occur sporadically and locally.
Now the interesting thing is that, in the sciences, stability refers to a state over time. That is, a stable isotope won’t decay into something else, and a stable system is in equilibrium, or a steady state. (“Stable” and “steady” have similar etymologies, both related to “standing” and “place.”)
Disorder is not necessarily an unstable state of affairs. In fact, a certain degree of disordered knocking about, say of the atoms of a gas in a container, may actually be its equilibrated state. Not all substances are solid crystals, with their atoms locked in a lattice, fixed.
In fact, regions of the world where a high degree of order is joined with stability are usually the result of a high degree of energy constantly going into the system. In human societies, it’s order that is highly unstable; it requires the pervasive threat of violence and punishment. You have to put in a great deal of effort and expenditure to preserve order. It’s the same reason you keep a house clean but let it get messy. The tendency is toward entropy, and entropy is disorder, and disorder is lawlessness, and lawlessness permits the worst to do their worst.
This may well be the nature of stability in human affairs: Social evils are stable and carry on easily, until a superior force overcomes them. Slavery required a war to end it; human criminality requires a police force and justice system (both, admittedly, flawed) to keep it in check; large-scale conventional war between “great powers” has been averted (so far) only by the threat of a still more catastrophic war (nuclear war).
The situation achieved is always unstable, always threatening to revert. The social good—civil order—is unstable, and requires great effort to attain and continuous effort to preserve.
There is one corollary to this last point. It has to do with the definition of “the social good.” The most monstrous upheavals in history have occurred when societies or groups have shifted their sense of “the social good” to war. The opposite of order is not war, remember, but lawlessness; war, by contrast, is a highly orderly state of affairs. Contrast the command and unity of action in a military force with the populace strolling a peaceful city. This is why peace is more common than war, why the majority of the world population was living outside any active theater of operations, even during World War II. War, being far more intensely ordered than peace, is therefore more rare and localized; it is the most unstable state of all.
When a society redefines war instead of order as the ultimate social good, war is where all their energy goes. A perpetual state of war is the unsteady state that they exert themselves massively to maintain: Alexander’s drive for conquest, the Mongol invasions, the 7th-century Arab idea of all unconverted lands being the Dar al-Harb (“House of War”), Napoleon’s levee en masse, Hitler’s eager wish for war baffling Britain’s wish for “peace in our time,” and the modern jihadi philosophy that longs for an apocalyptic showdown against the infidel West: These are mindsets that perplex societies which strive so energetically to achieve and maintain civil order, that consider civil order their supreme social good. It is a myth, perpetuated by the outcome of the Napoleonic Wars and World War I and II, that an order-loving society, when challenged by a war-loving ones, rouses and destroys the war-loving society. In fact, the opposite has been true. The Arabs Islamized Zoroastrian Persia and the then-Christian countries of the Middle East; the Mongols and Macedonians were not defeated, settling down to rule on as Khans and Mughals, Ptolemies and Seleucids.
War, because it is so orderly and unstable, unlocks the energy of the society that takes it as a goal. The United States, while it looks like a society that seeks civil order, is actually a society that seeks perpetual war, or at least a perpetual war footing. One needn’t be an Orwellian to think this. Civil order is a side effect; the emblematic image is that of cast-off military vehicles and weaponry, repurposed by police forces. NATO allows many a Western democracy to cultivate smallish, orderly, semi-socialist states while their militaries atrophy. It is America that builds and maintains the aircraft carriers, submarine fleets, and massive nuclear arsenal that undergirds the “stability” of the West (and parts of Southeast Asia). This “stability,” of course, is a misnomer; the reality is exactly the reverse; the present is actually a very unstable situation that requires great expenditure to maintain.
Not only is it unstable, it may not even be effective anymore; it was based on a threat that seems, increasingly, like a bluff. A presidential candidate has already sent signals that the country may renege on its alliances and treaty obligations. Granted, that candidate is an anomalous one—or was, until he was normalized by a major party. Note that it wasn’t his skepticism about the current world order that squandered his support in the polls. Trump’s absurd candidacy is probably the preliminary tremor in a larger shift that will take place within a generation. History repeats itself, said Marx, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” In this case, it’s the first time that’s the farce. The second time will be the tragedy.