Thought is dangerous: it comes from outside.

It obeys no subject and no demand.

It is the singular event that passes through the living —

witness that the “human” is an output, not an origin.

Regime Survival Is Not Social Survival: The Politics of Rebuildability

There is a comfortable lie built into most commentary about war and “strategy.” The lie is that when power talks about survival, it is talking about the survival of a society. It is not. In many contemporary configurations, “survival” is an operator applied to the regime’s continuity, not to the population’s lived continuity. The regime survives if it can keep the admissibility rules intact, preserve command elasticity, and retain the capacity to reconstitute the field after shock. The population is not the subject of survival. It is a rebuildable substrate.

This is why so much public debate feels irrelevant. It is irrelevant, by design. Civil reaction is classified as noise, then recycled as mood data, then used to retune messaging. Whether the reaction is pro or contra, it is processed as variability, not as a constraint on action. The apparatus does not “listen.” It samples. That is the whole point of admissibility governance: determine in advance what counts as signal, who gets to speak as signal, and what can be ignored without consequence. This is not a moral failure. It is a design choice.

The Times of Israel piece is a clean window into this logic. Senator Lindsey Graham frames the outcome in a way that matters not because it is true or false but because it is a definition. He says that if the ayatollah remains in power, that would be a “strategic victory for Iran,” while the U.S. decision horizon is “weeks, not months.” This is not analysis of events. It is pre-emptive construction of the victory condition. The trick is obvious: if “victory” is defined as regime persistence, then the opponent can “win” by default. Damage can be real, infrastructure can be degraded, capabilities can be delayed, and yet the victory claim is immediately available: the center held. The regime survived. Therefore the threat failed.

What matters here is not Iran, Israel, or America as moral actors. The drama is not in cabinets. It is in open air: in the operational atmosphere where costs, deadlines, credibility, energy risk, inspection regimes, and media cycles form one continuous forcing function. In that field, decisions are less authored than precipitated. “Weeks, not months” is not information. It is self-binding. Once declared, it manufactures pressure to act, because in an admissibility regime, the credibility of declared horizons becomes an object that must be defended. A state can be pushed into action not because action is optimal, but because not acting would collapse the regime’s performative authority. That is how “strategy” turns into compulsion while still wearing the costume of choice.

Now insert the element that most commentary refuses to touch: in a society where a large share of the population is “active” in military terms, or one degree away from it (service, reserve duty, rotations, families), the word victory is not a talking-point. It is a shorthand for one brutal question: does this end the cycle, or does it schedule the next mobilization. But here is the inversion that matters: the apparatus does not need victory in that sense. It needs rebuildability.

Rebuildability is not humanitarian. It is not even primarily economic. It is the regime’s capacity to reconstitute the population as a functional input after major disruption. Not as persons. As recruitability, compliance, production capacity, tolerable loss acceptance, and narrative absorbability. These are the dimensions the apparatus cares about because these are what make the field governable after shock. Once you see that, the moral language falls away on its own.

An image of decision; not of where decisions are made

This is why “society” is so often treated as if it were infinitely replaceable. Because for the apparatus, it practically is. Populations can be displaced, traumatized, impoverished, fragmented, and then made functional again under a new configuration of thresholds: new policing intensity, new economic dependency, new educational scripts, new memory policies, new information hygiene. For the apparatus, this is not tragedy; it is reconfiguration. This is not a conspiracy. It is a structural property of governance under conditions where admissibility, rather than truth, becomes the primary object.

In that framework, the survival of power does not mean the survival of a society as a living continuity. It means the continuity of the rules that determine what can happen next. The population can be mauled as long as it remains reconstructible into a usable shape. In fact, extensive confrontation often helps reconstruction, because it breaks prior forms of social autonomy and simplifies the field. After shock, thresholds can be moved. Costs can be normalized. Exceptions can be made routine. “Emergency” becomes the baseline. The apparatus does not fear destruction if destruction improves controllability.

This is the point where the usual debate collapses. Pro-war and anti-war positions frequently share the same error: they treat the population as the implicit subject. They imagine that the aim of strategy is to protect “society” or to improve its prospects. That is an outdated model of governance. In a rebuildability regime, society is not protected; it is processed. The only object protected is the apparatus’s capacity to continue deciding, classifying, and retuning.

Once you accept this, you can finally understand why civil reaction is structurally impotent. It is not that people do not care. It is that their caring has been pre-classified as irrelevant. Civil response is admissible only as spectacle, as venting, as morale indicator, as polarization fuel, as evidence of democratic vitality, as a pressure valve. It is not admissible as a condition on action. Unless it touches what the apparatus cannot easily rebuild.

And this is the hard question. What is not rebuildable.

Do not answer with moral abstractions. In a rebuildability regime, abstractions are free. They are cheap to co-opt and cheap to rebrand. The only things that matter are constraints that cannot be restored on demand.

First, trust as everyday infrastructure. Institutions can be rebuilt. Compliance can be induced. But spontaneous, distributed trust is not a plug-in module. It has long formation times and low compressibility. When it collapses, it is not replaced by “more institutions.” It is replaced by coercion and transactionality. A regime can function without trust, but it becomes brittle and expensive. That brittleness is a real constraint.

Second, memory as the capacity to discriminate. Not memory as a narrative, but memory as a practical ability to distinguish regime survival from social survival. The apparatus is excellent at rebuilding narratives. It is less excellent at rebuilding discrimination once it is lost, because discrimination depends on informal transmission, lived comparators, and unregulated channels of inference. When discrimination collapses, everything becomes “necessary,” and necessity becomes the universal solvent of critique. That is the perfect condition for rebuildability. So the question is whether discrimination can be preserved under pressure, not whether “truth” can be broadcast.

Third, the threshold of refusal to be treated as rebuildable material. This is not a romantic call for uprising. Revolt is predictable and often useful to the apparatus, because it justifies further retuning. What matters is a refusal that targets the apparatus’s reproduction points: recruitability, legitimacy of threshold shifts, and the automatic conversion of public life into an input stream. A refusal that is not a protest message but a constraint on rebuildability.

Here is the key sentence, stated without pity and without moral varnish.

A regime can survive a society if the society is rebuildable; therefore, the central conflict is not about victory but about whether life may be treated as restart material.

Once you say that, the rest becomes clearer. “Strategic victory” defined as the persistence of a leader is not a grotesque rhetorical flourish. It is a correct statement inside the rebuildability logic. If the center persists, the apparatus retains the capacity to reconstruct. If the apparatus retains the capacity to reconstruct, it can treat population damage as manageable. And if population damage is manageable, then arguments about “society” become background noise.

This is why cabinet talk misleads. Cabinets do not create the field. They navigate it. The field is open-air: market risk, credibility pressure, inspection regimes, media accelerants, institutional deadlines, and the constant imperative to keep the admissibility machinery coherent. In that atmosphere, the subject is not a nation. The subject is the apparatus that classifies what counts, decides what can be said, and survives by converting destruction into rebuildability.

If you want to speak seriously into this environment, stop demanding compassion for non-subjects. Compassion is a decorative language easily metabolized by the apparatus. What matters is identifying where rebuildability breaks, and how admissibility rules can be forced to acknowledge constraints they cannot simply relabel as noise.

The rest is not politics as debate. It is politics as the struggle over what cannot be rebuilt.

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)