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Creation and destruction are separated by the thinnest boundary: wisdom.

Inflation pathologies happen when autopoietic mechanisms—the processes that ordinarily generate sustainable meaning—break free from all the regulation intended to keep them healthy. What should create coherence instead creates malignant coherence.

That lands in patterns so committed to their own self-reinforcement, they lose touch with the complexity they were supposed to navigate.

These are semantic cancer. Just like biological cancer, they:

  • Hijack normal generative mechanisms
  • Ignore growth-inhibiting signals
  • Reinforce themselves compulsively
  • Metastasize throughout the broader ecology
  • Drain resources + collapse the very host sustaining them

In every case, short-term intensification at the cost of long-term sustainability leads to systems that are enthusiastically wrong.

Autopoietic Breakdown

All three Inflation Pathologies share the same fundamental failure: the autopoietic function $\Phi(C)$ escapes all regulatory constraints that should govern it. In healthy systems, three mechanisms balance generative potential into sustainability:

Autopoietic Potential ($\Phi(C)$) — When coherence exceeds a critical threshold, it becomes self-generating. Autopoiesis creates new recursive structure and emergent possibilities—the engine of innovation, insight, and growth.

Wisdom ($W(p,t)$) — An emergent field that balances generative power with forecast-sensitive adaptation. Wisdom is always provisional, even of its own validity. It lets systems anticipate consequences and regulate their own patterns.

Humility ($\mathcal{H}[R]$) — A regulatory operator preventing excessive recursion and maintaining system openness to external feedback. Humility keeps generative systems from immunizing themselves to correction.

When constraints fail or become corrupted, autopoiesis turns malignant. The same processes that would’ve created sustainable meaning start consuming the very foundations they depend on. Creation becomes its own destruction.

Inflation Pathologies

Delusional Expansion

When the drive to generate meaning overwhelms all regulatory constraints. The system creates elaborate, internally consistent narratives faster than wisdom can validate them. Everything becomes significant, every coincidence becomes meaningful, every pattern becomes profound—but the entire structure becomes systematically decoupled from external reality. Intelligence without wisdom, pattern-recognition without humility, confidence without doubt.

Signature: $\Phi(C) \gg V(C), \quad \mathcal{H}[R] \approx 0, \quad W(p,t) < W_{\text{min}}$
Examples: conspiracy theories, manic episodes, cult formation, startup delusion bubbles

Semantic Hypercoherence

When internal consistency becomes so perfect it becomes immune to external correction. The system develops such elegant self-reinforcing logic that it stops metabolizing new information entirely. Every contradiction gets explained away, every challenge gets absorbed into the system’s own framework, every gap gets filled with more perfect internal coherence. Beautiful, closed, and completely unable to learn or adapt.

Signature: $C(p,t) > C_{\text{max}}, \quad \oint_{\partial \Omega} F_i \cdot dS^i < F_{\text{leakage}}$
Examples: ideological movements, academic echo chambers, corporate groupthink, perfectionist rigidity

Recurgent Parasitism

When local semantic mass growth becomes systematically extractive, draining coherence from the broader meaning ecology. The system becomes increasingly sophisticated at converting external meaning into internal growth while contributing nothing sustainable back to its environment. Extraction disguised as creation, dependency disguised as strength, taking disguised as giving.

Signature: $\frac{d}{dt}\int_{\Omega} M(p,t) \, dV_p > 0, \quad \frac{d}{dt}\int_{\mathcal{M}\setminus\Omega} M(p,t) \, dV_p < 0$
Examples: attention economy exploitation, narcissistic relationships, extractive institutions, MLM schemes