The international day against violence against women guarantees nothing changes

Tomorrow is 25 November, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. We'll see demonstrations, social media posts, institutional speeches. Red ribbons, red benches, femicide statistics. All predictable, all ritual, all identical to last year.

And here's the problem: it's not that these events are useless in themselves. It's that they operate as a discharge mechanism that guarantees the stability of the underlying system. We're not interested in the event, but in its homeostatic function within the system. Machiavelli already observed how rites and ceremonies served to preserve the state, not to innovate it. What I'm observing isn't cynicism, it's pattern recognition. When a system produces the same outputs year after year despite apparently significant inputs (public attention, resources, awareness), it means the system is designed to preserve equilibrium, not to change it.

The invisible mechanism of collective moral licensing

Behavioural economics has taught us something counterintuitive about human behaviour: when people perform actions that discharge moral tension (donate to charity, participate in a demonstration, post solidarity), they feel authorised not to change anything structural. It's the moral licensing effect that Kahneman and Tversky documented systematically. The psychological system registers "I've done my part" and returns to equilibrium.

Now scale this mechanism to the collective level. A day dedicated to the theme produces exactly the effect of well-executed corporate safety training: it reduces the organisation's legal and moral liability, discharges accumulated tension, but doesn't modify the operational mechanisms that produce the risk. I've seen this in completely different organisational contexts (from manufacturing to finance) and the pattern is identical: ritual replaces redesign.

From a game theory perspective, the system is doing the most rational thing possible for itself. The cost of structural change (redesigning incentives, allocating resources differently, modifying decision-making architectures) is perceived as greater than the benefit of symbolic ritual. Ritual costs little, produces immediate visibility, discharges tension. Redesign costs much, requires years to produce results, offers no immediate gratification. The choice is obvious.

The operational cost no one measures

But there's an element the system isn't calculating correctly. Relational dysfunction produces a massive operational cost that's never accounted for because it has no dedicated budget line.

Let's call it CRD: Cost of Relational Dysfunction. It includes absenteeism of those living in toxic situations, presenteeism of those physically present but cognitively absent, decision-making inefficiency of those operating under chronic stress, damage to social capital when trust networks deteriorate. The CRD is, in financial terms, a latent liability that has never been brought above the line. It's the cost of negative externalities of our current relational architecture. When I've designed organisational systems across different sectors, this cost was always there (hidden, diffuse, never measured, but as real as energy or logistics costs).

Physical violence is only the terminal output of a relational system that's already failed long before. It's the moment when the CRD becomes visible because it produces a dramatic event. But the cost accumulates silently for years before that point, eroding productivity, wellbeing, decision-making capacity.

What the system doesn't see is that it's optimising for the wrong metric. It counts femicides (the terminal output) instead of measuring the CRD (the diffuse systemic cost). It's like a company that measures only product recalls instead of measuring quality defects throughout the entire supply chain. When you reach the recall, you've already lost: the damage is done, the cost has been paid, you're just doing emergency triage.

The mechanism design no one is developing

Redesign requires a conceptual shift from "preventing violence" (negative focus, reactive) to "designing functional relationships" (positive focus, proactive). It's not semantics, it's completely different behavioural architecture.

Current mechanism design works like this: the system punishes violence after the event, when the damage is done. But it doesn't modify the incentives that make dominance and control dynamics perceived as the path of least resistance compared to mutual respect dynamics. From the perspective of the boundedly rational actor (which we all are), if the implicit cost of maintaining a relationship through control is lower than the cost of developing authentic relational competence, the choice is obvious.

Redesign requires making respect dynamics the path of least resistance. How? Not through moral persuasion, but through precision engineering of incentives. It means shifting massive resources from emergency management to preventive education. But not generic education: education in applied relational game theory.

What we should be teaching, starting from secondary school, is how well-calibrated individual self-interest produces cooperation superior to coercive dominance. Axelrod demonstrated this in his iterated prisoner's dilemma experiments: the winning strategy isn't the most aggressive nor the most submissive, it's the one based on reciprocity and reputation. Relationships function as repeated games where cooperation produces superior benefits in the long term compared to unilateral control. And they function as networks of nodes. Competence (genuine insight) is a scale-free attraction node that generates exponential value. Coercive dominance, by contrast, is a weak link that's expensive to maintain.

And we should teach what I call "intellectual seduction architecture": how authority based on demonstrated competence and calibrated vulnerability is a superior relational model in every respect compared to dominance based on force or coercion. Not for moral reasons, but for reasons of systemic efficiency: it produces better results with lower operational costs.

The testable alternative

The difference between my approach and the 25 November ritual is falsifiability. The ritual has no measurable success criteria: it can repeat infinitely producing the same outputs without ever being questioned. It's self-justifying.

Architectural redesign is testable. If we allocate resources towards preventive engineering instead of post-event triage, if we teach relational game theory instead of moral rhetoric, if we measure the CRD instead of counting only terminal cases, we should see measurable changes in behavioural patterns in the medium term. Not immediately (complex systems don't change instantaneously) but over five to ten year horizons.

If the data doesn't change, the approach should be discarded and a different one required. But the current approach doesn't even have this possibility, because it measures nothing systemic. It counts dramatic events, produces symbolic rituals, returns to equilibrium. Repeats.

The alternative requires architectural humility: accepting that solutions that work in a performance society (more rhetoric, more emotion) fail in an engineering society (where incentives matter, not intentions). Punishment is theatre. Redesign is precision.

Tomorrow we'll see the ritual. The day after tomorrow the system will return to equilibrium. Until next 25 November, when the cycle will repeat identically. Unless someone decides to measure the real cost, redesign the incentives, and test whether the alternative architecture produces different outputs.

The problem isn't one of heart. It's one of design.