The Dynamics of Regime

This book develops a diagnostic framework for a cluster of phenomena that are usually treated as unrelated: the stasis at the frontier of theoretical physics, the persistent pluralism of the social sciences, the retreat of grand philosophical narratives, the fragmentation of public discourse, and the proliferation of pseudo-theoretical symbolic production under generative artificial intelligence. The book argues that these are not independent problems but different manifestations of a single structural transformation. The transformation is not the disappearance of ends. It is a change in the relation between a community and its own mode of organization.

The framework's core concept is regime: the tacit arrangement between a human symbolic system and its own mode of organization. A regime is not a political regime. It is not bound to meta-goals, and it is not bound to reflection capacity. Its carrier is restricted to human symbolic systems. A regime has two inseparable layers. Regime content specifies what a community pursues, or by what it is governed; it admits five types—boundary, temporal, genealogical, prohibitive, and meta-goal—of which the meta-goal type is one among five, not the terminus. Regime procedure specifies how the content is maintained, interrupted, or reflected upon; it admits three coexisting pathways.

The stability of a regime depends on its resilience: the robustness of a community's pluralism under pressure, measured by dialogue density, cross-framework knowledge accumulation, and weak selection—the elimination of manifestly inadequate frameworks without the imposition of a single orthodoxy. Resilience is a degree. It is reported side by side with exclusion cost, the cost of the voices and perspectives that a configuration excludes in order to sustain its stability. Exclusion cost is a mode. The two are reported asymmetrically and are not collapsed into a single index. A report that states resilience without stating exclusion cost misdescribes a configuration sustained by exclusion as a healthy condition. When resilience declines, a regime may enter a vacancy interval in which the old content has lost its authority and no new content has emerged. This condition may trigger reflection: the thematization of the regime's tacit premises. Reflection makes the regime visible and changes its status; even if the regime is reaffirmed, its authority is no longer the same.

The book traces four evolutionary pathways: high-resilience lock-in, low-resilience drift, silent dissolution, and oscillatory state. It distinguishes three modes of external intervention—perturbation, capture, and takeover—bounded by three conditions: evaluative autonomy, internal accountability, and self-referential capacity. It calibrates the framework against historical cases including Lysenkoism, Deutsche Physik, and contemporary institutional capture.

The framework yields two principal conditional predictions. The first is structural non-convergence: a community that lacks sufficient regime procedure will not converge on a single framework. The second is bifurcation: a destabilized community will split into high-resilience and low-resilience sectors according to its structural condition at the moment of destabilization. For each prediction, the book specifies the observations that would reduce its credibility. Because its objects are open, self-referential complex systems, the framework adopts a weak testing system—rules for raising or lowering confidence in response to evidence—rather than a Popperian criterion of decisive falsification.

The book concludes with a diagnostic instrument: a four-step checklist (boundary screening, content audit, resilience assessment, capture detection) and two ethical commitments held by different agents. The analyst's commitment binds the user of the instrument. The theorist's commitment binds the writer. The book advances a conditional normative inference: if a community wishes to preserve the askability of the question "Where are we going?", it must institutionalize reflection on its regime. The anchor is formal, not substantive; the inference is hypothetical, not categorical.

The framework is itself a regime, and this is stated from the first page. It closes the self-referential gap through a three-layer isomorphism—the regime of the community, of the reader, and of the author—whose standard of mutual constraint is traceability: every judgment must state from which layer it is made, on what evidence it is based, and what it leaves unresolved. This is neither relativism nor self-confirmation. The book identifies two types of misuse and directs its protection primarily at the first. It opens three research lines: further decoupling of the concept of regime; extension of the framework to non-human self-referential symbolic systems; and development of the individual branch of meta-regime theory, of which this framework is the collective branch. The individual branch is not developed.

The book does not construct a new regime. It does not tell the reader how to live, where to go, or what to resist. It makes the structural condition visible so that those within it can see their situation more clearly.