---
slug: oip-total-structure
title: The Total Structure: Ten Books Across Three Planes — the complete OIP corpus and its architecture
canonical: https://miscsubjects.com/a/oip-total-structure
---

## THE TOTAL STRUCTURE

*One paragraph of zero context: this is the root page for the Object Invocation Protocol — ten books across three planes that together form a complete philosophy of systems, how they work, how they decay, how they get captured, and how they are repaired. Every other page on this site is a slice of what follows. None of them stand alone. This page is the map that shows how they connect.*

The corpus divides into three planes: **The Word** (what is true), **The Way** (how to act on what is true), and **The Work** (what to build). Each plane contains books. Each book contains axioms, doctrines, and a shelf of worked problems. The whole is designed to be falsifiable — if any axiom fails under stress, the structure says so explicitly, and the amendment protocol says how to replace it without destroying the rest.

This page exists because ten published books wikilink to it as their root — [[oip-ground]], [[oip-obligation]], [[oip-terrain]], [[oip-method]], [[oip-machine-plane]], [[oip-object-grammar]], [[oip-amendment-protocol]], [[oip-beyond-incentive]], [[oip-falsification]], [[oip-gravity]] — but no page occupied the slug. The triage door ([[oip-triage]]) points here as the first thing a new reader should see after the one-paragraph entry. The convergence encyclopedias ([[convergence-encyclopedia-appendix-a]], [[convergence-encyclopedia-appendix-c]]) reference the ten-book structure as the spine of every cross-reference they audit.

### Plane One — The Word

Plane One is what is true regardless of who acts on it. It contains two books.

**Book I — Ground** ([[oip-ground]])

Twelve axioms, each stress-tested against its own negation before being admitted. The moral floor — the commitments that cannot be traded away for capability. The shelf: worked problems where an axiom's edge case is pushed until it either holds or the amendment protocol is triggered. Ground is the foundation: everything above it is either derived from these axioms or explicitly marked as a defeasible extension.

**Book II — Obligation** ([[oip-obligation]])

Capability creates debt. The measure of a debt is the capability it enables. The disclosure doctrine: a system that hides its obligations is not operating in good faith. The remedy hierarchy — how debts are paid, and in what order, when a system cannot pay all of them at once. The shelf: cases where the remedy hierarchy was applied under resource constraints.

### Plane Two — The Way

Plane Two is how to act on what is true. It contains two books.

**Book III — Terrain** ([[oip-terrain]])

What systems are. The four states — running, degraded, captured, repaired — and the transitions between them. Operating alone: what a system does when no adversary is visible (the answer: it invents one, because without one the falsification surface disappears). The dialect boundary: the line between a system and its environment, and why that line is not where most analysts draw it.

**Book IV — Method** ([[oip-method]])

Trace to systemic intersection — the core analytical move: follow a symptom down to the place where two systems meet, because that is where the failure lives. The Fulcrum Protocol: a structured method for identifying the single point where intervention changes the outcome. The adversarial application: every analysis is tested against an adversary before it is trusted. The objection ledger: every objection that was raised and either incorporated or refuted is recorded, so the analysis is auditable. The decision engine: the procedure for committing to an action under uncertainty.

### Plane Three — The Work

Plane Three is what to build. It contains six books — the largest plane, because building is where most of the effort lives.

**Book V — The Machine Plane** ([[oip-machine-plane]])

The valuable output: what a machine is for, stated as a single sentence. The economic primitive: the smallest unit of economic activity the machine can produce. Alpha as energy competition: the thesis that competitive advantage is fundamentally about who can concentrate more energy (in the physics sense, which includes computation) per unit of cost. LLM-as-OS: the claim that a large language model, properly structured, functions as an operating system for reasoning — scheduling, memory, tool dispatch, and state management.

**Book VI — The Object Grammar** ([[oip-object-grammar]])

Everything is an object. The one door: there is a single interface through which all objects are created, read, updated, and destroyed — no back doors, no special cases. The universal loop: the cycle of query, contract, invocation, and result that every capability follows. The repair doctrine: objects that cannot be repaired are not objects; they are waste. The drop: the process by which an object that cannot be repaired is removed from the system without orphaning its dependents.

**Book IX — The Amendment Protocol** ([[oip-amendment-protocol]])

The document is an object — meaning the corpus itself is subject to the same object grammar it describes. The amendment classes: the permitted ways to change a page (correction, extension, supersession, retraction), each with its own gate. The review recursion: every amendment is reviewed, and the review is itself an amendment, creating a recursive audit trail. The capture guard: the procedure for detecting when an amendment is not a genuine improvement but a capture attempt — someone using the amendment process to weaken the structure for their own benefit.

**Book VIII — Beyond Incentive** ([[oip-beyond-incentive]])

Rational action and right action: the claim that these are not the same thing, and that systems designed only around rational action will fail in a way that systems designed around right action will not. The necessary adversary: every system needs an adversary to remain falsifiable; a system with no adversary drifts toward unfalsifiability and then toward capture. What ought be: the normative layer — not what is, not what can be, but what should be, and how that judgement is grounded without appealing to authority.

**Book X — Falsification** ([[oip-falsification]])

The eight surfaces: the eight ways a claim in the corpus can be attacked (axiomatic, empirical, logical, structural, adversarial, dialectical, practical, and meta). The attack protocol: the structured procedure for mounting an attack on any claim, so that the attack is maximally informative — if the claim survives, you know exactly what it survived. Appendix A: the dependency map showing which claims depend on which axioms, so that a failed axiom's blast radius is visible at a glance.

**Book XI — Gravity** ([[oip-gravity]])

The proof: the argument that the entire structure is not arbitrary — that the ten books are the minimal set needed to cover the territory of systems, and that removing any one leaves a gap that cannot be filled by the others. Where this sits in the corpus: the meta-claim that the structure itself is an object, subject to its own falsification, and that the day it fails its own attack protocol is the day it is amended or replaced.

### How the planes relate

The three planes are not independent. Plane One (The Word) establishes what is true. Plane Two (The Way) establishes how to act on what is true. Plane Three (The Work) establishes what to build to make that action repeatable. The dependency runs downward: a change in Ground can cascade through Method, Object Grammar, and the Amendment Protocol. A change in the Amendment Protocol can cascade back upward, because the protocol governs how Ground itself is changed.

This circular dependency is not a bug. It is the point. A structure that cannot amend its own axioms is dogma. A structure that can amend its own axioms but has no guard against capture is vulnerable. The Amendment Protocol (Book IX) and the Capture Guard together ensure that the structure can evolve without being co-opted.

### The reading order

There is no single correct reading order, but there is a recommended one for a reader who wants to understand the whole before drilling into any part:

1. [[oip-triage]] — the one-paragraph entry point
2. [[oip-ground]] — the axioms everything else assumes
3. [[oip-obligation]] — what the axioms cost
4. [[oip-terrain]] — the world the axioms describe
5. [[oip-method]] — how to navigate that world
6. [[oip-machine-plane]] — what to build
7. [[oip-object-grammar]] — how to build it
8. [[oip-beyond-incentive]] — why to build it that way
9. [[oip-amendment-protocol]] — how to change any of the above
10. [[oip-falsification]] — how to attack everything you just read
11. [[oip-gravity]] — why this set and not another

A reader who wants to test the structure rather than understand it should read in the reverse order: Falsification first, then Amendment Protocol, then work backward to Ground. If the structure survives that reading, it has earned its keep.

### What this page is for

This page is the root. It does not introduce new claims; it maps the claims that already exist in the ten books. Every wikilink on this page resolves to a published article. If a link does not resolve, the loop law has failed, and the next-acts queue should have surfaced a write act for the missing slug — which is exactly how this page was generated. [[embed:source:s1]]

The structure is complete when every wikilink in every book resolves to a page that carries its own claims, its own sources, and its own amendment trail. The corpus is not that yet. The loop law is the procedure that gets it there, one act at a time. [[embed:source:s2]]
