Communication Breakdown as a Systems Failure: Expectation, Feedback, and the Degradation of Social Coherence

This paper examines communication breakdown at individual, social, and institutional scales through the lens of systems theory. It treats human cognition and social organization as predictive communication systems that rely on reliable feedback between expectation and outcome. When this feedback remains coherent, systems self-correct and remain stable. When persistent mismatches arise, coherence degrades.

The analysis argues that many forms of psychological distress, social fragmentation, and institutional dysfunction are better understood as structural feedback failures rather than moral, ideological, or cognitive deficiencies. Breakdown begins locally, but propagates upward when repair mechanisms fail, leading individuals and groups to rely increasingly on abstract narratives in place of trusted feedback.

Meaning-seeking is framed as a compensatory stabilization response to unresolved incoherence: it reduces cognitive load in the short term but increases rigidity and polarization when feedback integrity is not restored. At scale, increased communication volume amplifies instability rather than resolving it if signals no longer correlate with outcomes.

The paper concludes that restoring coherence requires the recovery of reliable feedback pathways, not persuasion or narrative replacement. The work is intended as a descriptive systems-level account of communication failure, applicable across psychological, social, and institutional domains.