If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves.… There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.
Robert Pirsig, Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Some books don’t just sit on your shelf—they settle into your bones, whispering their truths long after you’ve turned the last page. Robert Pirsig’s words did that for me. That line about factories, about how you can tear them down but if the logic that built them remains, another will rise in its place—that is Haiti. That is the endless loop of fixes that fix nothing, revolutions that change rulers but not the machinery beneath them, interventions that claim to break the cycle but instead reinforce it.
Haiti has never lacked solutions. The world has thrown money at it, policies, experts, peacekeepers, strongmen, technocrats. They have dismantled governments, rewritten constitutions, redrawn borders of power. And yet, the system remains. The logic that built the chaos is still intact, the structures that choke the people’s progress are still standing, their roots deep beneath the rhetoric of reform.
Look at our history. Every supposed breakthrough, every imposed solution, has been laced with the seeds of the next problem. Independence came in 1804, but the world decided Haiti’s freedom was a debt to be repaid. They called it diplomacy, called it reparation, but what it really was—a noose. One that tightened with every loan, every embargo, every deal cut in foreign halls to dictate the shape of people’s sovereignty.
They said Duvalier would bring stability, said foreign intervention would bring order, said NGOs would bring development. But each time, the logic of dependence, of external control, of manufactured crisis remained untouched. The system does not die—it adapts. It learns how to wear new names, new faces, how to march under banners of reform while replicating itself, unbothered, unchanged.
And so Haiti keeps rebuilding, keeps restarting, keeps being told to follow blueprints drawn by hands that have never held its struggle. But the house never stands. Because what needs breaking is not just the factory but the thinking that keeps rebuilding it. What needs revolution is not just leadership but the very idea of what Haiti is allowed to be.
That is the haunting truth of Pirsig’s words. And that is the weight of Haiti’s history—not a failure to rise, but a world that refuses to let it stand on its own two feet.
