Band theory gives us a surprisingly clean way to think about how societies hold together in ordinary times. In physics, the valence band is where electrons normally sit, while the conduction band is where they move freely to create current. The band gap between the two determines whether a material is an insulator, a semiconductor, or a conductor. Map this onto society, and the metaphor falls neatly into place.
The “filled levels” are families—localized, tightly bound, not easily mobilized beyond themselves. The “valence band” is the layer of communities, where obligations and shared norms extend outward but are still bounded. The “conduction band” is the realm of collective myth and narrative, where individuals are mobilized into something bigger: nations, religions, ideologies, global causes. The band gap models the difficulty of moving people from daily life into that larger narrative.
Steady-State Politics — Conduction
Different societies can be described in terms of their effective band gap. Authoritarian systems behave like insulators: the gap between community life and grand narrative is wide, so ordinary people cannot easily participate in the larger myth unless forced. They may chant the slogans and attend the rallies, but only with heavy input energy from the state. Liberal democracies behave more like semiconductors. They have small gaps, so with the right input—propaganda, education, culture, or crisis—people can cross into the mythic domain relatively easily. Revolutions, wars, or national projects excite them into the conduction band. Visions of utopias and anarchist communes look more like conductors (and may temporarily approximate them), with everyday life and collective narrative overlapping. In those rare and short-lived cases, living itself is already participating in the grand myth; no excitation energy is required.
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We’re reading Montaigne’s essays this month in the Contraptions book club.
This metaphor becomes richer when we introduce the idea of doping. A pure semiconductor has uncertain properties: it sometimes conducts, sometimes doesn’t. Societies without institutional doping are like this—mobilization is unpredictable and irregular, depending on chance events or charismatic leaders. Doping stabilizes the behavior.
In physics, N-type doping introduces surplus carriers, while P-type introduces holes. In society, N-type doping looks like ideological elites and propaganda networks supplying ready-made channels to the grand narrative. Think of commissars in the Soviet Union or clergy in medieval Europe, injecting surplus ideological “electrons” into the system. P-type doping works the other way: institutions deliberately create holes in community life that people seek to fill by plugging into the larger myth. Mandatory schooling, conscription, and taxation operate this way. You don’t get to feel whole unless you step into the grander story.
When N- and P-type regions meet, we get PN junctions. These behave like gates or rectifiers, permitting one-way flow. The Catholic Church in the Middle Ages is a classic example: laypeople could not access the grand narrative directly. The clergy formed a junction layer, controlling how myth flowed down into everyday life. The modern transistor, the heart of electronics, provides the best metaphor for constitutional democracies. A transistor regulates when conduction happens and how strong it is, switching on during crises like wars and switching off in peacetime. It amplifies weak signals into stronger currents while maintaining control. Integrated circuits map neatly onto supranational bureaucracies like the EU, where multiple doped and patterned regions interact in complex ways to coordinate flows across many domains simultaneously. Overdoped systems, by contrast, are brittle. North Korea conducts only in one rigid direction, with every channel forced by ideology. The system is predictable until it fails catastrophically.
The steady-state politics of conduction, then, is about how institutions set the band gap, dope the system, and regulate the flow of people into the mythic layer. Societies are essentially designed for particular conduction behaviors, and political stability is a matter of keeping current flowing at the right rate. Too much flow and the system overheats into chaos; too little and it freezes into stasis.
Revolutionary Politics — Explosions
Explosions are not about electronic conduction. They are about chemical chain reactions in materials that store energy in metastable bonds. Left undisturbed, those bonds persist; given a trigger (heat, shock, spark), a few bonds break and release energy that accelerates more breakage. The result is a self-propagating reaction front whose speed and coupling to its surroundings determine whether you get a slow deflagration (subsonic burn), a high-order detonation (shock-driven reaction), or something in between. In this frame, band theory is useful only for the threshold story—it models how hard it is to “lift” a system from a bound state to a reactive one (activation/transition costs, institutional gaps, doping-like preparation). Once ignition occurs, the dynamics are governed by chemistry and kinetics: reaction rates, sensitivity, initiation mechanisms, and cascading propagation.
Mapped conservatively to societies: steady politics is about whether people can cross institutional thresholds into shared narratives (the band-gap picture). Revolutionary politics is about whether a polity has accumulated metastable social energy—grievances, contradictions, constrained pathways—that, once sparked, cascades as a reaction front (contagion of action, not “current” in the electronic sense). Authoritarian, heavily “doped” regimes trap energy (little everyday bleed-off), so they are sensitive once initiation succeeds; flexible systems vent energy through routine channels, raising the threshold and quenching cascades.
With that distinction clear, the historical mapping tightens up. The American Revolution looks like controlled combustion: energy released primarily as organized, subsonic processes—pamphleteering, assemblies, campaigns—more deflagration than detonation. The French Revolution resembles a stable secondary explosive (TNT-like): relatively tolerant to handling until a sharp initiating shock—fiscal and political fracture—drives a fast, coherent reaction front that destroys the old order. Russia 1917 is closer to nitroglycerin: high energy density and extreme sensitivity; small shocks (mutinies, bread riots) suffice to initiate a rapid, poorly bounded cascade. Iran 1979 reads like ANFO: the “fuel” (social discontent) was widespread but required a detonator and booster—clerical leadership plus economic and geopolitical shocks—before a robust front could propagate. The Arab Spring is best treated as a thermobaric/fuel-air phenomenon: diffuse fuel cloud (regional youth bulge, digital networks) + ignition yields a powerful transitory overpressure (regional flashover) that, without structural coupling, fails to consolidate into durable post-reaction structures.
The first-term Trumpist insurgency aligns with pyrotechnics: vivid ignition, low energy density, quick damping by existing institutional quenchers—spectacle rather than structural reaction. By contrast, the second Trump term (eight months in, with Project 2025 already in execution) is not a mass chemical runaway explosion but an engineering application akin to a shaped charge or thermite cutter. The analogy is precise: a shaped charge focuses energy to sever structural members; thermite eats through targeted joints. Politically, this corresponds to targeted institutional breach—personnel realignments, procedural rewrites, and reorganizations designed to alter the “band structure” itself so future mobilizations face lower thresholds along preferred pathways. That is an operational strategy, not a hypothetical one; it aims to reconfigure the substrate rather than ignite a popular detonation. In kinetic terms, it substitutes directed, localized energy for a broad chain reaction and seeks irreversible deformation of load-bearing components (rules, norms, routinized workflows), after which even modest sparks can propagate along newly prepared channels.
Taken together, a careful division of labor holds: band theory frames the energetics and thresholds of social activation (how tightly bound daily life is, how institutions raise or lower activation costs, how “doping” patterns readiness). Chemistry explains what happens after ignition (reaction sensitivity, initiation mechanisms, front propagation, quenching). Revolutions misread as “big currents” blur categories; treated correctly, they are reaction cascades through a prepared medium. Some burns are slow and governable; some detonations race and overrun; some regimes forgo a popular cascade entirely and instead cut and reweld the structure so that, going forward, the path of least resistance runs in one direction.
Conclusion
Band theory provides a rigorous way to describe the steady state of politics. Families, communities, and myths align like bands in a material, while institutions set the size of the gap that must be crossed for people to move from daily life into collective narratives. Doping by institutions further refines the pathways of participation, shaping whether societies behave like insulators, semiconductors, or conductors. In this mode, politics looks like current flow: a matter of thresholds, mobilization, and regulation.
But revolutions are not simply larger currents. They are better understood as chemical chain reactions: stored energy in metastable bonds released through cascades once ignition occurs. Here band theory still helps frame the threshold problem—how tightly energy is bound, how activation is blocked or facilitated—but the propagation is a matter of chemistry, not electronics. Revolutions differ by their energetic profiles: some smolder as controlled combustion, some detonate as high-order explosives, and some, like today’s engineered institutional rewiring, act more like shaped charges or thermite cuts, deliberately altering the structure rather than relying on mass ignition.
Taken together, the two metaphors give us a divided but complementary toolkit. Band theory explains why some societies are stable conductors of steady political life while others trap vast potential energy. Chemistry explains how that energy, once triggered, runs away as a cascade—or is redirected through engineered demolition. Societies are not just circuits but also materials under stress, storing and releasing energy in ways that make the difference between a hum of ordinary current and the shock wave of systemic rupture.
Recipe
Protocol: Band Theory of Societies Essay
1. Seed Mapping (Band Theory → Society)
Map physics to social layers:
Filled levels → Family
Valence band → Community
Band gap → Institutions (thresholds)
Conduction band → Grand narrative / myth
Establish conduction as the metaphor for steady-state politics.
2. Steady-State Section (Part I)
Use band theory straightforwardly: insulators (authoritarian), semiconductors (modern states), conductors (utopian/communal).
Extend with doping = institutions (N-type, P-type, PN junctions, transistors, ICs).
Map to historical and contemporary societies (Soviets, U.S., Catholic Church, EU, North Korea).
Present politics as current flow: steady mobilization regulated by institutions.
3. Revolutionary Section (Part II, rewritten)
Start by clarifying physics/chemistry distinction:
Band theory helps explain activation thresholds.
Chemistry explains explosions: metastability, initiation, reaction fronts, cascades.
Map revolutions to explosive classes:
American Revolution = controlled combustion.
French Revolution = TNT (stable until shocked).
Russian Revolution = nitroglycerin (extreme sensitivity).
Iranian Revolution = ANFO (needs detonator).
Arab Spring = thermobaric (diffuse flashover).
Trump I = fireworks (pyrotechnic flare).
Trump II = shaped charge / thermite (targeted institutional breach, already underway with Project 2025 execution).
Emphasize: steady politics = conduction, revolutions = reaction cascades, engineered institutional rewiring = demolition chemistry.
4. Synthesis & Form
Write in an explainer voice: two big parts (steady state, explosions), paragraphs not bullets.
Anchor each concept with both the physics/chemistry analogy and historical examples.
Add diagrams manually (stack of bands, etc.) to keep metaphor visual and grounded.
That’s the recipe we followed: map, extend, contrast, rewrite conservatively, illustrate manually.