Despite our desire for continuous functionality or perdurability, no system can sustain its optimal status forever. Decay will deteriorate even a healthy system, and it will lead eventually to an end state.

For Organic Systems:

  • Healthy state: Perdurable (maintains existence over time)
  • Intermediate decay: Physiological Sickness (decline in perdurability)
  • End state: Dead System (perdurability lost)

For Instrumental Systems:

  • Healthy state: Functional (performs intended purpose)
  • Intermediate decay: Physiological Breakage (decline in functionality)
  • End state: Destroyed System (functionality lost)

For Mixed Systems:

  • Healthy state: Conciliation (sustains longing equilibrium)
  • Intermediate decay: Physiological Crisis (decline in conciliation)
  • End state: Dissolved System (conciliation lost)

This decay process takes many forms depending on the system. For Organic and Instrumental systems, the cycle from health to end is relatively straightforward. Mixed systems, however, are especially vulnerable to status decay, making full-health states difficult to achieve—and even harder to preserve. Yet only mixed systems retain a pathway to transcend their own end state—a potential unavailable to the purely organic or instrumental.

We’ll explore this conciliation pathway in our final theoretical chapter.

🔖 End of Part 4 🔖