Chapter XXI: When Order Is Violated, Reality Responds
A structural analysis of what happens when coherence degrades across biology, institutions, and civilization.
Not About Blame: About What Violation Does
This chapter is not about blame. It is about what happens when alignment is violated at scale
Long before I could articulate it, something in me sensed that the coherence of water is a design principle embedded in all created systems, from living organisms to ecosystems to the cosmos itself, and, as we will explore in the final chapter, is even echoed in the instituted systems run by man.
A key insight is that in coherent fluids, components can move, mix, exchange, and transport. Gradients can form and persist. Signals can propagate. Metabolism becomes possible. Life does not operate in solids. It operates in fluids.
It is a physical condition, like humans inhabit, that also exists on a continuum. Fluids either transmit signals cleanly, or they degrade into noise. Living organisms either maintain internal order, or they compensate until they fail. Systems, whether created or instituted by man, either hold together under load, or they do not.
For many months, it was a vague intuition and not yet a theory. I could clearly see and study coherence in water, in soil, and across biology without letting it collide with my own history.
That changed when memories of COVID began to reappear, as they so often do. With this new lens, my understanding of that period began to shift.
Before COVID
Before COVID, I lived inside a world that still made sense to me. It wasn’t perfect, and it certainly wasn’t always just, but its failures felt largely, but not always, human in scale, and episodic rather than total. Institutions were flawed and incentives were often misaligned and for sure bureaucracy could be deadening. Yet beneath all of that sat an assumption I did not know I was carrying: when real danger arrived, when lives were truly at stake, the system would stay standing, resist, bend toward truth, toward care, toward whatever worked.
Then COVID arrived, right as my second daughter was fighting the same devastating illness that had so traumatized our family two years earlier.
