Framework
The analytic structure behind Anomics: how modern systems remain active while losing the ability to conclude.
What Anomics Analyzes
Anomics is a structural analysis of coordination systems.
It does not study beliefs, values, personalities, ideologies, or intentions. It does not explain why people feel the way they do, nor does it evaluate whether particular outcomes are just or desirable.
Its object is narrower and more mechanical.
Anomics analyzes how systems coordinate action across time—and specifically how they end things: disputes, roles, obligations, relevance, and responsibility. These endings are not moral achievements. They are functional requirements. Without them, coordination does not accumulate into outcome.
A system can function, expand, and appear legitimate while losing this capacity. Anomics is concerned with that condition.
The Central Variable: Settlement Capacity
The central analytic variable in Anomics is settlement capacity.
Settlement capacity is the ability of a system to produce outcomes that are binding across time—outcomes that conclusively end a process, constrain future interpretation, discharge obligation, and authorize participants to stop without penalty.
Settlement capacity is not:
agreement
legitimacy
justice
trust
satisfaction
correctness
A decision can be unjust and still settle a matter.
A rule can be contested and still bind.
A process can be widely accepted and still fail to conclude anything.
Settlement capacity refers to a simpler property: whether outcomes constrain what can happen next.
When settlement capacity functions, disputes close, roles end, obligations discharge, and time hardens decisions into facts. When it weakens, activity continues without arrival.
The Core Failure Mode: Non-Settlement
Non-settlement occurs when systems continue to operate while losing settlement capacity.
Under conditions of non-settlement:
- decisions are made but do not bind
- processes continue without verdict
- records persist without forgetting
- responsibility accumulates without discharge
This is not stagnation. These systems are often highly active, communicative, procedural, and sincere. Participation increases. Oversight expands. Evaluation intensifies.
What disappears is the ability for action to resolve into settled states.
Anomics treats non-settlement as a structural condition, not a cultural mood or moral decline.
Analytical Method and Limits
Negative Design Analysis
Anomics operates through negative design analysis.
Rather than asking how systems should be improved, this method identifies structural impossibility conditions—cases where a system cannot achieve its stated function without undermining its own viability.
A negative design system is one whose continued operation depends on the persistence of the very problem it exists to address.
The limits of such systems are expressed as stopping rules.
This analysis:
- does not attribute bad faith or intent
- does not rely on motivational psychology
- does not propose reforms or solutions
Its function is to delimit what cannot be fixed from within the existing structure.
When further adjustment reproduces the failure, analysis stops.
Macro / Micro Symmetry
Anomics operates at two scales.
Macro-Anomics analyzes institutions, markets, platforms, and organizations.
Micro-Anomics analyzes individuals understood as role-bearers within those systems.
The relationship is symmetric.
Institutions that lack settlement capacity generate roles that cannot conclude. Individuals embedded in non-settling systems experience effort without completion, obligation without discharge, and identity without arrival.
Micro-Anomics is not a psychology of the self.
It is a sociology of unfinished roles.
The Tier Structure (I–VI)
Anomics organizes non-settlement into six structural tiers, ordered by increasing distance from closure.
Tier I — Terminal Incompatibility
Settlement would collapse the system entirely.
Tier II — Discouraged Settlement
Settlement is possible in principle, but structurally risky.
Tier III — Procedure Without Verdict
Process expands to absorb the risk of decision.
Tier IV — Memory Without Forgetting
Past actions retain indefinite relevance.
Tier V — Authority Without Binding
Decisions are authorized but do not constrain outcomes.
Tier VI — Ambient Non-Settlement
Non-closure becomes the background condition of coordination.
These tiers apply at both macro and micro levels.
The Three Core Mechanisms
Across domains, non-settlement is stabilized by recurring mechanisms.
Procedural Expansion
Safeguards, reviews, consultations, and frameworks proliferate, displacing verdict with process.
Temporal Non-Closure
Time no longer settles outcomes. Decisions decay rather than harden. Reopening becomes easier, not harder.
Interpretive Inflation
Explanation, justification, and context multiply as binding declines, widening the space for reinterpretation.
These mechanisms are adaptive. They arise from normal operation under conditions where finality concentrates risk.
What This Framework Can and Cannot Do
This framework can:
- diagnose recurring coordination failures across domains
- explain exhaustion without moral blame
- identify structural limits on reform and adjustment
This framework cannot:
- offer personal guidance or self-help
- prescribe political, institutional, or ethical programs
- determine what should be valued or pursued
Its contribution is diagnostic clarity, not direction.
The Keystone Argument
The framework reaches its strongest form in Settlement Failure, which integrates the diagnosis across domains and specifies the structural limits of reform, procedural repair, and deliberation under conditions of weakened settlement capacity.
On Novelty
Anomics does not claim to discover new human motives, incentives, or pathologies.
The mechanisms described here—evaluation pressure, risk deferral, procedural expansion, memory persistence—are well documented across sociology, economics, and organizational theory.
What is new is their integration and formalization into a single diagnostic framework centered on settlement capacity.
Anomics shows how these familiar mechanisms converge into a specific failure mode: systems that remain active, sincere, and rule-governed while losing the ability to settle outcomes.
The contribution is therefore structural rather than psychological, and diagnostic rather than prescriptive.
If the analysis is correct, it should feel recognizable—not surprising—because it names what has been happening in plain sight.
How to Use This Framework on the Site
Use this page to orient yourself.
Read the Essays to see individual mechanisms isolated and examined.
Read How to Read Anomics for suggested paths.
Read the Books to see the same framework applied to specific domains.
This framework is the grammar.
Everything else on the site is written in it.