Animal spirits (a novel in the making)

The plot that shaped my debut novel. I hope to find the courage to publish it.

A modern state is a vast and fragile construction; a shared space among selfish individuals who come together only because they recognize that aggregation is the most effective way to fulfill their personal needs. The balance of collective life is governed by how consistently and effectively these individual interests are met.

When financial or economic crises bring an end to the numbing spread of prosperity, the hierarchy of needs reemerges with clarity, revealing the true nature of human beings: ravenous creatures in search of satiation.

The increasingly difficult effort to feed the utility function of the masses awakens instincts long dulled by evolution, yet never eradicated. Impoverished citizens begin to feel anxiety, anger, and fear.

The actions that follow subtly shift the collective center of gravity toward a bad equilibrium; the logical result of a zero-sum social physics: the satisfaction of one need mathematically equals the disappointment of another.

Assailed by forces as old as life itself, the public edifice corrodes, adapts, decays, darkens. And eventually, it transforms; in a desperate attempt to best serve the most ancestral and urgent of human needs. Democracy is a second-order one.