For decades, the dominant theory of how the world would develop went something like this.
As countries got richer, they would become more like each other. Specifically, they would become more like the wealthy liberal democracies of Western Europe and North America. They would adopt market economies, representative governments, individual rights, secular institutions, and the broader cultural patterns of cosmopolitan modernity. The pace would vary, but the direction was the same. Modernity was a destination, and all countries were on the road to it.
This theory has not held up.
Countries have gotten richer without becoming Western. Countries have adopted market economies without adopting liberal democracy. Countries have built modern infrastructure while maintaining traditional social structures. Countries have, in many cases, moved away from convergence as they developed, not toward it. The theory is wrong, and most of the people who still hold it have not updated.
This chapter is about why the convergence theory was wrong, and what the actual variable is that determines how different countries organize themselves.
What the variable is
The variable is not wealth, not religion, not culture, not history exactly. The variable is where regulation is held.
Every society has to solve the problem of how to keep its members from harming each other, how to coordinate large numbers of strangers around shared activities, how to transmit values across generations, and how to absorb disruption when it comes. The problem is universal. The solutions are not.
Some societies solve the problem by placing regulation inside the individual. The individual is expected to develop internal restraint, internal direction, internal capacity for self-governance. The institutions around the individual are kept relatively light, because they do not have to do most of the regulating; the individuals do it themselves. This is the founding ideal of the American system, and it survives in patchy form in some Northern European countries.
Other societies solve the problem by placing regulation inside the group. The individual is shaped by family, by community, by religious institutions, by ethnic identity. The internal regulation of any given person is partial; what holds the person in place is the network of relationships and obligations they were born into. This describes most of Asia, much of the Middle East, most Indigenous societies, and most of the historical world.
Still other societies place regulation inside the state. The individual is shaped by national institutions, by the security apparatus, by mandatory programs, by official ideology. The internal regulation of any given person is whatever the state allows; the state itself does most of the work of keeping things in order. This describes the most authoritarian systems — China, Iran, North Korea, the Soviet Union — and significant pieces of every modern country in milder form.
No society uses only one of these. Every society uses some combination. What varies is the weight given to each, and the question of which one carries the load when the others fail.
North Korea
North Korea is the most extreme case of state-held regulation in the contemporary world. The internal regulation of the individual is almost entirely suppressed. Group-based regulation is allowed only to the extent that it serves the state. The state itself carries virtually all of the regulatory function, through total control of information, total control of movement, total control of economic life, and total control of the symbolic order.
This produces a society that is highly stable in the short term and almost completely incapable of any adaptation that the state has not authorized. When the state functions, the society functions. When the state fails, the society fails with it, because there is no other layer of regulation to fall back on. The state has been efficient at preventing internal dissent, but the cost is that the country cannot respond to changes in its environment that the state has not anticipated.
This is not a model anyone outside North Korea wants to copy. It is included here as the limit case — what happens when state regulation absorbs all other forms.
Iran
Iran represents a different configuration. Some autonomy is permitted to individuals. Family and community regulation is strong. Religious regulation is woven through all of it. The state operates as a final authority that can override any of the others when it perceives a threat to the system, but in normal times it does not need to operate at full force, because the religious and communal regulators are doing most of the work.
This is why pressure on Iran from outside often produces the opposite of its intended effect. Sanctions, threats, and isolation strengthen the religious and communal regulators because they make the society feel embattled. Sanctions weaken the state's resources but they reinforce the state's narrative that the society needs to remain unified. The internal regulation that exists is enough to absorb the external pressure, and the system stays intact.
This will not change through external force. It will change, if it changes, when the internal balance of regulation shifts — which will happen, when it happens, on a timescale that outside observers do not control.
Tibet, historically
Pre-occupation Tibet represented yet another configuration. Spiritual regulation, carried by the Buddhist tradition, was woven directly into governance. The Dalai Lama held religious and political authority simultaneously. The system worked because the religious tradition was actually compatible with autonomy — Buddhist practice cultivates internal regulation as a core spiritual exercise — and because the population's belief in the system gave it the authority it needed without requiring coercion.
Outside observers often romanticized this system or condemned it depending on their politics. What is more interesting structurally is that it worked. Internal regulation, religious authority, and political authority were aligned, and the alignment produced stability without requiring the heavy enforcement apparatus that most centralized systems require.
The system was destroyed by Chinese occupation, which replaced it with a much more recognizable model of state-imposed regulation. The original system cannot be reconstructed at scale now, but it remains useful as a case study in what is possible when the layers of regulation align rather than conflict.
The United States
The United States represents the most ambitious attempt in modern history to place regulation entirely inside the individual.
The founders assumed that with the right educational, religious, and civic conditions, citizens could carry the regulatory load themselves, leaving the state to handle only the functions that genuinely required collective action — defense, infrastructure, interstate disputes. The system was kept deliberately light, on the assumption that the heavy work would happen inside individual citizens.
This worked, partially and imperfectly, for a long time. The country produced an unusual amount of innovation, entrepreneurship, mobility, and reinvention precisely because the assumption that individuals could regulate themselves left more space for individuals to do unusual things.
The system has been failing because the internal regulation has eroded. Schools that used to build self-reliance now manage behavior. Households that used to teach restraint now consume entertainment. Communities that used to enforce norms have thinned out. Workplaces that used to demand maturity now provide HR departments.
The result is a country whose institutions were designed for self-regulating citizens, populated increasingly by citizens who require external regulation, with the gap being filled by an expanding apparatus of laws, procedures, professionals, and platforms that none of the founders would have recognized.
The American crisis is structural in this specific way. The country's official ideology still claims to be about freedom and self-governance. The country's actual functioning increasingly resembles the externally regulated societies it was supposed to be an alternative to. The dissonance between the ideology and the reality is producing the discontent that drives every political faction's sense that something has gone deeply wrong.
Why countries do not converge
Countries do not converge because the underlying question — where regulation is held — does not have a single right answer.
Internal regulation is the most fragile arrangement. It requires conditions that take generations to build and can be lost in a single generation. Countries that try to switch from group-based or state-based regulation to internal regulation usually fail, because the institutions to support internal regulation have to grow over a long time, and the existing population does not have the underlying capacity yet.
Group-based regulation is the most durable arrangement. It survives political upheaval, economic disruption, war, displacement. It is also the most resistant to change, because the regulatory function is distributed across so many small relationships that no central authority can dictate it. Countries built on group regulation rarely abandon it voluntarily.
State-based regulation is the most efficient arrangement in the short term and the most brittle in the long term. It produces rapid coordination at the cost of innovation and resilience. Countries that lean heavily on state regulation can mobilize quickly but cannot easily change direction.
Every country uses a combination. The combination is shaped by history, geography, culture, and the accidents of how the country was put together. Convergence theorists thought wealth would homogenize the combinations. It has not. It will not. The combinations are too deeply rooted to be moved by economic development alone.
What this means for understanding the world
Most political conflict between countries is downstream of the question of where regulation is held.
The West cannot understand why authoritarian states refuse to liberalize. The authoritarian states cannot understand why the West thinks liberalization would be an improvement. Each side is making sense from inside its own regulatory architecture, and neither side can fully see the other's architecture without stepping outside their own — which most people, most of the time, cannot do.
The same dynamic operates inside countries. American conservatives, who lean toward group-based and traditional regulation, cannot understand American progressives, who lean toward institutional and state-based regulation. American progressives cannot understand American libertarians, who lean toward individual-based regulation. Each faction is making sense from inside its preferred regulatory architecture, and each faction is mostly arguing with the others about which architecture should be carrying the load.
The arguments do not resolve, because the answer is not the same for every situation. Sometimes individual regulation is the right answer. Sometimes group regulation is. Sometimes state regulation is. The skill is in knowing which one fits which situation, and that skill is not something any single political faction has a monopoly on.
What this chapter is for
This chapter is to give you a clearer way of looking at international and political conflict than most of the available frameworks provide.
The next time you read a news story about a country doing something that seems incomprehensible — China cracking down on a dissident, Russia maintaining authoritarian control, Israel refusing to negotiate, Iran resisting Western pressure, the United States bickering with itself — ask where the country's regulation is held. The answer will usually explain the behavior, even when the behavior looks irrational from outside.
And the next time you find yourself certain that another country, another political faction, or another community is simply wrong, consider that they might be operating from a different regulatory architecture than yours. They might be wrong. They might also be making structural sense inside their own arrangement, in a way that is invisible from inside yours.
The world is not on a single road to a single destination. It is a set of different arrangements, each managing the same underlying problem in different ways, each with its own costs and benefits, each unlikely to converge on any of the others.
Understanding that is the beginning of being able to think clearly about international affairs, about political conflict, and about the question of what kind of regulatory architecture you want to live inside yourself.