Humanism
When a Film Becomes a Mirror for a Difficult Life
08 August 2026
The Law That Marks the Limits of Power
Cybernetics — the science of control and regulation in systems — studies the limits of effective governance over complexity, along with its applications and developments in systems theory, management theory, and complexity theory. Its basic law, formulated by W. Ross Ashby, the Law of Requisite Variety, says in its most famous form: “Only variety can destroy variety.”
Variety means the number of distinguishable states in a system. A tossed coin has a variety of two: this “system” knows only two states, heads and tails. A die has six. What variety does the European Union have? It is hard to say exactly, except that the number is gigantic.
A System Larger Than Its Center
The Union consists of 27 member states of different sizes, with different traditions, cultures, economies, and interests. It has an exceptionally tangled institutional structure and 24 official languages. Its most important institutions — the European Council, the Commission, the Council of the European Union, the Parliament, and the Court of Justice of the European Union — often overlap in their competences, and in such a way that Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, or simply Montesquieu, must be turning in his grave.
And this is only the tip of the institutional iceberg that makes up the Union. Beyond the institutions already mentioned, it includes further bodies, several dozen agencies with their own legal personality, a complex system of committees and procedures known as comitology, probably several thousand formal European interest groups, and an extraordinarily complicated system for making EU law.
Add to this tens of thousands of legal acts, millions of companies, institutions, and organizations, billions of political, economic, social, and cultural interactions, and all of it exposed to powerful external disturbances: wars on the Union’s borders, migration, a pandemic, geopolitics. Such variety can make the head spin.
Some estimates — and we should stress clearly that they do not rest on hard calculations and should be treated rather as intuitive approximations — place this number somewhere between 10²⁰, a one followed by 20 zeros, and 10³⁰, a one followed by 30 zeros. However one counts it, the number is enormous. To imagine its scale, consider that a quintillion millimeters is more than 100 billion light-years, greater than the diameter of the entire observable universe.
The EU Crisis Begins Inside the System
No central regulator can “destroy,” meaning effectively steer, such variety: not the European Commission, not the Council, not the Parliament, and not all EU institutions taken together.
When the variety of a system exceeds the variety of the regulator, the system does not become absolutely ungovernable. It does, however, stop allowing predictable central control. Decision-making paralysis and silo behavior appear. In the case of the Union, this means a lack of cooperation and/or rivalry among different actors in EU politics, for example between institutions such as the Commission and the member states, or among the member states themselves.
Gradually, the system loses sight of the purpose for which people built it. Bureaucracy becomes more important than citizens and drifts further away from them.
More Power Does Not Mean More Control
In theory, the European Union could use Ashby’s law in different ways. One strategy, promoted by the EU establishment, could be called the centralizing strategy. Its justification begins with a plain fact: the European Union does not operate in a vacuum. It must respond effectively to ever new challenges and external disturbances: wars on its borders, geopolitics, globalization.
Maintaining the benefits of complex integration — the internal market, the four freedoms, and so on — and increasing common negotiating power require, according to supporters of this option, centralizing measures. These include, for example, abolishing unanimity where it still exists and replacing it with qualified majority voting.
Yet these supporters overlook one fact: such a centralized, “superstate” structure would have to be — not merely could be, but would have to be — authoritarian.
EU Reform Does Not Have to Mean Centralization
Ashby’s law also points to another possible strategy, largely the reverse of the one described above. When we ask how to govern the enormous variety of a system such as the European Union effectively, we discover, perhaps with surprise, that the EU already has certain mechanisms built into its structure that cybernetic optimization requires. It simply rarely uses them — or, increasingly often, does not use them at all.
It is as if someone had pulled the plugs out of some parts of this vast EU cybernetic machine. The need to provide the regulator with the required variety — in the language of cybernetics — means distributing the absorption of variety. In the language of the European Union, it means decentralization and subsidiarity.
Instead of concentrating all “required variety” in one central regulator — the European Commission, the Parliament, or the Court of Justice of the European Union — the system should distribute it across many local regulators: the member states, which respond better to local disturbances in the system, and, where possible and appropriate, their lower administrative units.
The Union Has a Safety Fuse. It Stopped Using It
The Union already has this mechanism. Article 5(3) of the Treaty on European Union sets it out:
Under the principle of subsidiarity, in areas which do not fall within its exclusive competence, the Union shall act only if and in so far as the objectives of the proposed action cannot be sufficiently achieved by the Member States, either at central level or at regional and local level, but can rather, by reason of the scale or effects of the proposed action, be better achieved at Union level.
In cybernetic language, the principle of subsidiarity simply means moving control to the place where variety is smaller and easier to master. Yet the Union regularly ignores Article 5(3) TEU. The plug called “subsidiarity” usually hangs outside the socket. What, then, is the future of the European Union?
Unity Does Not Have to Mean Uniformity
Greater autonomy for subsystems should go hand in hand with subsidiarity. This mechanism also already exists. Before the Union entered its current crisis, it often helped achieve compromise in contested matters by allowing different degrees of integration: “multi-speed integration,” various opt-out clauses, the eurozone, the Schengen Area, autonomy in military affairs — most member states belong to NATO, while some maintain neutrality, and Austria even enshrines it in its constitution — and many other arrangements.
In theory, the Union still accepts this state of affairs. Yet many actions over the past ten years have moved toward the first strategy: centralizing the Union and making it more uniform. This has happened both through formal proposals to amend the European treaties and through the practice known as competence creep: the appropriation of competences by EU institutions, especially by the Commission and the Court of Justice of the European Union, for example through CJEU case law on the constitutional systems of member states.
In theory, decentralizing proposals would be easy to implement, because they do not require treaty change, only the political will of the member states. They — let us recall — remain the masters of the treaties, and therefore of the Union, not the other way around. The problem is that the most important member states do not seem interested.
The Future of the European Union Does Not Lie in a Superstate
Further uniformity and further tolerance of competence creep must drive the system toward entropy, that is, toward chaos: a permanent decision-making crisis or a revolt of subsystems such as Brexit.
Effective governance of the Union does not mean building a “superstate.” On the contrary, it requires accepting that the EU must remain a polycentric system. Those who dream of centralization should remember the Union’s motto: In varietate concordia, “United in diversity” — and we should add, in cybernetic diversity as well.
The survival of the Union depends on plugging the subsystems back into their sockets. In practice, that means returning to flexibility, subsidiarity, and multi-speed integration as the only scientifically justified ways, under these conditions, to cope with complexity. If the EU crisis has a cybernetic lesson, it is this: a network of states can survive where a superstate may only pretend to govern.
Read this article in Polish: Nie superpaństwo, lecz sieć państw. Cybernetyczne spojrzenie na kryzys UE
