Every civilization convinces itself that it has achieved permanence. Each believes that its institutions, markets, and laws will stand unshaken, that progress will proceed according to plan, that history itself has been domesticated. But beneath this illusion, another rhythm persists—the slow heartbeat of the inevitable. The future revolution is never absent; it waits, quiet but unyielding, within the contradictions of the present.

Our age has done something remarkable and tragic: it has commodified even rebellion. Discontent is now a product category. We can subscribe to dissent, adorn ourselves with slogans, perform our outrage on screens for applause. Revolution has been repackaged as a lifestyle—available for delivery, compatible with every convenience. Yet this very commercialization betrays the truth: the system has learned to mimic change but cannot produce it. Authentic transformation remains its one unmanufacturable good. The genuine act, the unpurchased gesture, stands as the only true scandal.

The arithmetic of absurdity

To call the future revolution inevitable is not prophecy but arithmetic—what we might call the arithmetic of absurdity. When the cost of maintaining illusion exceeds the comfort it provides, truth becomes affordable again. Empires do not collapse because idealists overthrow them; they collapse because their lies grow too expensive to sustain. A society can survive corruption, cruelty, even incompetence—but not absurdity. When people cease pretending to believe, the edifice of deceit falls of its own accord.

The Soviet Union did not fall to NATO tanks but to the exhaustion of its own citizens’ willingness to perform belief. By the late 1980s, even party officials had stopped pretending the system worked—they simply went through motions everyone recognized as theater. The Berlin Wall came down not because it was stormed but because guards could no longer sustain the pretense that it mattered. East Germany’s Stasi had files on millions, yet collapsed in weeks once people stopped acting afraid. Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution succeeded because the government could not answer Havel’s simple question: ‘Why?’ Apartheid South Africa fell not to armed insurrection but to the unsustainability of its founding lie—that human dignity could be parsed by pigment. When the cost of pretending exceeded the cost of admitting truth, the system dissolved. The end rarely arrives with violence; it comes instead with laughter, that ungovernable recognition that the emperor’s garments were imaginary all along.

This arithmetic operates across all contexts, though on different timescales and through different mechanisms. Each historical collapse reveals a distinct aspect of how the calculation unfolds. The Soviet system demonstrated exhaustion of belief—the arithmetic operated through psychological fatigue, the simple inability to continue performing enthusiasm for a system everyone knew had failed. Apartheid illustrated the unsustainability of founding lies—the arithmetic worked through moral incoherence, the impossibility of maintaining a system whose core premise violated observable reality. The American civil rights movement showed refusal to perform—the arithmetic operated through withdrawal of participation in the theater of legitimacy. Solidarity in Poland exemplified withdrawal of consent—the arithmetic worked through organized defection, workers collectively ceasing to pretend the party spoke for them. These are not merely examples but a taxonomy: the arithmetic has multiple operators, each suited to different structures of power.

Hermetically sealed systems like North Korea can delay the calculation through absolute information control. When citizens cannot compare their lived reality to alternatives, when every source of information confirms the official narrative, pretense becomes reality itself. The cost of maintaining illusion remains invisible because no one can price the alternative. But even North Korea cannot seal itself completely—smuggled USB drives carrying South Korean soap operas, Chinese cell phones picking up signals across the border, defectors’ testimonies circulating through whisper networks. Every crack in the seal is a data point in the arithmetic. The calculation may take generations, but it continues.

China’s bargain—material improvement in exchange for political silence—postpones the reckoning by offering comfort alongside constraint. This is sophisticated authoritarianism: the system does not demand belief, only acquiescence; not enthusiasm, only prosperity. The arithmetic is deliberately balanced—as long as living standards rise faster than political frustration, the equation favors stability. But this bargain contains its own contradiction. When growth slows, when unemployment rises, when the generation raised in prosperity finds its expectations unmet, the calculation shifts. And the bargain has a second vulnerability: it creates citizens skilled at assessing cost-benefit ratios. A population trained to think economically about material life will eventually apply the same calculus to political life.

We saw this arithmetic accelerate during China’s zero-COVID policies. For three years, citizens performed compliance with increasingly absurd restrictions—not because they believed in the policy, but because the cost of defiance exceeded the cost of obedience. Then the calculation shifted. In November 2022, a fire in Urumqi killed at least ten people, trapped in their apartments by pandemic locks. Within days, protests erupted across China—not organized by dissidents, not led by activists, but spontaneous combustion of accumulated absurdity. People held blank sheets of paper, the ultimate symbol: the pretense had become so expensive that even silence felt like c