In Spinozian terms, Peru is doing well

By liberal–institutional standards, Peru looks chaotic, because of ita unstable governments, permanent conflict, informality everywhere, rules that never fully settle.
But in Spinozian terms, this diagnosis is upside down.

For Spinoza, a political body is not evaluated by order, elegance, or moral appearance. It is evaluated by potentia that is its capacity to persist, adapt, recombine, and increase its power to act under changing conditions.

Measured this way, Peru is not failing, instead it is functioning.

Potentia, not order

A strong political body, for Spinoza, is not one that suppresses conflict, but one that:

  • endures shocks without disintegration,
  • absorbs contradictory affects,
  • learns through encounters,
  • recomposes itself when forms collapse.

Peru does exactly this. Governments fall, institutions fracture, narratives dissolve, yet the collective body persists. That persistence is not only inertia; it is active recomposition.

Chaos here is not a sign of weakness.
It is the visible trace of high adaptive capacity of a society and polity that chose that way.

Informality as distributed conatus

What is usually called informality in Peru is, in Spinozian terms, a multiplicity of conatus:

  • parallel strategies of survival,
  • decentralized decision-making,
  • vernacular problem-solving,
  • redundancy instead of single points of failure.

Rather than one unified command, Peru operates through overlapping practices of persistence. This makes the system messy but resilient.

A body with many conatus is harder to paralyze than a perfectly ordered one.

Constituent power remains alive

Peru never fully freezes political life into sacred, untouchable institutions. Power is constantly contested, reinterpreted, displaced, and reclaimed.

In Spinoza’s terms (and later in Negri’s), this means potentia has not been fully captured by potestas. The state never fully closes the field of action. There is always leakage, pressure, and emergence.

This is uncomfortable.
But it is also vital.

Joy, sadness, and political affect

For Spinoza, joy is an increase in the power to act; sadness is its decrease.

Peru is full of suffering, but it also produces frequent moments of collective joy via creation, improvisation, recomposition, initiative. Action remains possible.

By contrast, systems optimized for calm and predictability often generate a diffuse sadness: resignation, self-censorship, stagnation, grey normality. Order is preserved by shrinking the field of action.

Spinoza would not choose calm over capacity.
He would choose joyful turbulence over sad stability.

A volatile world rewards Spinozian fitness

In a world of:

  • geopolitical fragmentation,
  • supply-chain shocks,
  • climate stress,
  • technological disruption,

the most “orderly” systems become brittle.

The systems that endure are those that:

  • tolerate uncertainty,
  • absorb conflict,
  • learn through failure,
  • recombine quickly.

Peru has been training under these conditions for decades.

Synthesis

In Spinozian terms, Peru is a living body that increases its power to act through conflict and recomposition, while more stable polities preserve themselves by narrowing action and, in a volatile world, life beats order.

Peru is not elegant.
It is not peaceful.
It is not reassuring.

But it is alive.

And for Spinoza, that is what matters.