---
slug: unified-philosophy-minimum-viable-conditions
title: Unified Philosophy: Minimum Viable Conditions
canonical: https://miscsubjects.com/a/unified-philosophy-minimum-viable-conditions
---

## Minimum Viable Conditions for a Healthy Society

A just society requires not perfection but **sufficiency across four conditions**:

### 1. Minimum Capable Actor Density
Sufficient distribution of capable actors across systems to maintain checking relationships. Not everywhere. **Enough.**

Gaps in capable actor distribution are gaps in the checking network. Predation accumulates in the gaps.

### 2. Minimum Checking Relationship Integrity
Systems must maintain **genuine accountability** to one another. When checking relationships collapse into collusion — when stewards of adjacent systems stop auditing each other and start protecting each other — the network fails.

This is the precise mechanism of institutional decay. Not individual bad actors. **Checking relationships that stopped checking.**

### 3. Maximum Leverage Invariant Placement
Remediation resources are finite. Capable actors have limited capacity across competing demands. The solution is not to remedy everything simultaneously. It is to identify the invariants that are **load-bearing to the most systems** and install there first.

Least action at the network level. **Fewest moves for maximum propagation.**

### 4. Minimum Predation Tolerance Threshold
A society remains healthy when predation tolerance stays below the threshold at which violations stop activating checking responses and start accumulating silently.

Once violations accumulate faster than checking responses activate, the decay clock accelerates. The threshold is not zero tolerance. It is the level **below which the network self-corrects** and above which it self-reinforces decay.

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## Claims

- **Claim:** Four minimum conditions are sufficient for a healthy society · **Tier:** system · **Confidence:** medium
- **Claim:** Checking relationship collapse is the mechanism of institutional decay · **Tier:** system · **Confidence:** high
- **Claim:** Maximum leverage invariant placement is the optimal resource allocation · **Tier:** system · **Confidence:** medium

## Example

A country with strong judicial review (checking relationship), active civil society (capable actor density), targeted anti-corruption laws at procurement hubs (maximum leverage), and a free press that exposes violations (low tolerance) — meets the minimum conditions without requiring universal virtue.

## What Would Falsify This

- Societies that meet all four conditions but still decayed.
- Societies that decayed despite having strong individual systems but weak checking relationships.

## Related

- [The Civilization That Compounds](/a/unified-philosophy-the-civilization-that-compounds)
- [The Propagating Invariant](/a/unified-philosophy-the-propagating-invariant)
- [The Civilizational Decay Clock](/a/unified-philosophy-the-civilizational-decay-clock)

---

## Corpus map
- Previous: [Unified Philosophy: The Propagating Invariant](/a/unified-philosophy-the-propagating-invariant)
- Next: [Unified Philosophy: The Civilization That Compounds](/a/unified-philosophy-the-civilization-that)
- Series start: [The Situation Report](/a/unified-philosophy-the-situation-report)
- Kin: [Total Structure root](/a/oip-total-structure) · [GRAIN](/a/grain-the-tilt)
