Part IV: Social Bonds

The Ordering Principle

Introduction

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The Ordering Principle

There seems to be an ordering principle: broader manifolds (those requiring participant flourishing) can safely contain narrower manifolds (those requiring only specific exchange), but not vice versa:

\viable_{\text{care}} \supseteq \viable_{\text{transaction}} \quad \text{is stable}

\viable_{\text{transaction}} \supseteq \viable_{\text{care}} \quad \text{is unstable (parasitic)}

The logic: if the containing manifold requires participant flourishing, then it will constrain the contained manifold to be non-harmful. If the containing manifold only requires exchange, it has no such constraint and will sacrifice the contained manifold when convenient. But this is a deduction from the framework, not an observed law. It needs testing.

Consider two cases:

Business between friends should be stable: the friendship manifold constrains the business, ensuring that the transaction never undermines mutual flourishing. If the deal would hurt the friend, the friendship-gradient overrides.

Friendship between business partners should be unstable: the transaction manifold constrains the friendship, ensuring that the relationship never undermines the deal. If the friend needs help that would cost the business, the transaction-gradient overrides.

If the ordering principle is real, it would explain a widespread social intuition: that it is acceptable for a friend to become your business partner, but suspicious for a business partner to become your friend. In the first case, the broader manifold was established first and contains the narrower one. In the second, the narrower manifold may be masquerading as the broader one—a parasite mimicking a host.

Proposed Experiment

Ordering principle study. Survey design: present participants with relationship-formation sequences (friend $\to$ business partner vs.\ business partner $\to$ friend; family member $\to$ employer vs.\ employer $\to$ "family") and measure (1) predicted trust, (2) predicted longevity, (3) predicted satisfaction. The framework predicts that broader-first orderings consistently score higher across cultures. Compare with matched samples where the final relationship configuration is identical but the formation order differs. If formation order has no effect, the ordering principle is wrong. If it has effect, measure whether the effect size correlates with the degree of manifold-breadth asymmetry as we define it.

Warning

Organizations that describe themselves as "families" while maintaining employment relationships are performing a specific rhetorical operation: claiming the broader manifold (care, belonging, mutual flourishing) while operating under the narrower one (labor exchange for compensation). This is not always cynical, but the geometric prediction is clear: when the manifolds conflict—when the "family" needs to lay off members—the transaction manifold dominates. The resulting sense of betrayal is structurally identical to discovering that a friendship was instrumental all along.