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Executive Summary
Modern societies face a paradox: unprecedented knowledge and technical capability coexist with rising burnout, chronic disease, institutional fragility, loss of trust, and erosion of shared meaning. These failures recur across domains, indicating a common structural origin rather than isolated dysfunctions.
This paper identifies that origin as the absence of an explicit second-order constraint governing how perspectives, representations, and dynamics may relate if systems are to remain intelligible and viable over time. That constraint is named the Coherence Constraint.
The argument proceeds through a convergence of three domains:
- General Relativity demonstrates that intelligibility in physics required abandoning privileged frames of reference in favor of invariance under transformation.
- Complex Adaptive Systems research shows that survival depends not on efficiency, but on coherence under disturbance, supported by buffers, redundancy, and distributed control.
- Information Geometry reveals that learning and meaning depend on low-curvature inference spaces where beliefs remain recoverable rather than brittle.
From this convergence, the paper articulates five second-order postulates: non-privileged perspective, invariance of coherence, local recoverability, viability under disturbance, and conservation of coherence debt. Together, these postulates constrain not outcomes or values, but the relations among models, metrics, and decisions that make continuation possible.
Applied to everyday life, the Coherence Constraint reframes health as intrinsic viability rather than absence of disease; organizations and governance as coherence-maintaining systems rather than output machines; education as recoverability rather than performance; and ethics as stewardship of conditions that preserve agency and trust across time scales.
The paper does not propose solutions to impose or ideologies to adopt. It offers orientation: how to recognize when coherence is being quietly spent, why optimization so often backfires, and how to design for recovery rather than control. Its conclusion is deliberately restrained: intelligibility is contingent, coherence is finite, and responsibility lies in how carefully that coherence is preserved.
