When things break, the impulse to restore them is immediate and almost unquestioned.
We speak of returning to normal, getting back to how things were, healing what was damaged. Across politics, ethics, therapy, and institutional reform, restoration presents itself as the obvious aim of repair.
This post argues that restoration is not merely difficult or idealistic. It is structurally incoherent.
1. What Restoration Presupposes
The idea of restoration carries with it a cluster of hidden assumptions. It presumes that:
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there was a prior state that was coherent and intact,
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the system undergoing repair remains fundamentally the same system,
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breakdown is an external disturbance rather than an internal transformation,
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and time can, in some meaningful sense, be reversed.
These assumptions feel natural because they align with everyday metaphors: objects breaking, wounds healing, machines being repaired.
But fields are not objects.
2. Breakdown Is Not Damage to a Thing
What we call breakdown is rarely damage to a system. It is a transformation of the field in which that system was intelligible and viable.
After breakdown:
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roles no longer stabilise in the same way,
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actions no longer afford the same outcomes,
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identities no longer cohere around the same constraints.
The system that one wishes to restore no longer exists — not because it has been destroyed, but because the field that sustained it has shifted.
To speak of restoration in such cases is to misdescribe the situation from the outset.
3. The Retrospective Illusion of “Before”
Restoration depends on a stable image of “how things were.”
But that image is always retrospective.
What we call the prior state is not a neutral baseline. It is a reconstruction made from the present, under present pressures, with present losses foregrounded and present tensions smoothed away.
The past appears coherent largely because we are no longer inside its instabilities.
Restoration aims at a remembered order that never existed in the form now invoked.
4. Why the Myth Persists
If restoration is incoherent, why does it remain so compelling?
Because restoration performs an important psychological and moral function. It offers:
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a sense of direction (“back”),
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a promise of closure,
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and the reassurance that loss can be undone.
It converts irreversibility into temporary disruption.
In doing so, it shelters us from the more difficult recognition that some changes cannot be reversed — only lived with and reworked.
5. Restoration as Ethical Comfort
Restoration is not just a practical aim; it is an ethical posture.
It allows us to believe that:
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harm can be fully repaired,
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justice can be completed,
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wounds can be closed.
This belief is consoling. But it comes at a cost.
When restoration becomes the metric of success, any repair that does not recreate the past is treated as failure — even when it enables new forms of viability.
The demand for restoration often prevents repair from occurring at all.
6. The Irreversibility We Refuse to Name
What restoration refuses to acknowledge is irreversibility — not as tragedy, but as structure.
This is not pessimism. It is descriptive accuracy.
To insist on restoration in the face of irreversible change is to misalign effort with conditions — and to compound damage by clinging to an impossible aim.
7. The Opening This Creates
Abandoning restoration does not mean abandoning care, responsibility, or repair.
It means relinquishing a false picture of what repair must look like.
Once restoration is released as a goal, a different question becomes possible:
Given that the field has changed, what forms of life, coordination, and care can now be made viable?
But it does allow repair to begin.
In Post 2, we will take the next step:
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