---
slug: grain-the-injustice-claim
title: GRAIN: 5. The Injustice Claim
canonical: https://miscsubjects.com/a/grain-the-injustice-claim
---

> **Meta-ethics (read first):** "injustice as base unit of wrong" is a **chosen atom** for this framework, not a discovery that silences consequentialist/virtue/contract rivals. Full statement: [A4](/a/oip-axiom-a4).

## The Claim

The universe has a built-in preference. It favors systems that feed what they touch. It starves systems that strip what they touch.

You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the ocean, folded small enough to look back at itself. And the ocean does not reward the mouth that drinks it dry.

Injustice destroys itself. Not because anyone stops it. Because it runs out of fuel. The only question is when.

## Definitions

- **Self-sustaining**: a system replaces what it uses faster than it uses it.
- **Self-destructing**: a system uses up what it needs faster than it can replace it.
- **Waste**: burning resources without producing anything useful.
- **Injustice**: a system exploits people faster than it can replace them.
- **Coercion**: forcing people to act against their own interest.
- **Conscience**: the inner sense that something is wrong.
- **Resources**: what a system needs to keep running.

## The Logic

Every system faces the same test. Does it feed its own future? Or does it eat it?

A forest fire leaves ash and nutrients. The forest grows back. That fire fed the soil.

A forest fire leaves only sterile ground. Nothing grows back. That fire ate its own bed.

Total war destroys the people and land it needs. It collapses. It ate its own army.

A tumor grows faster than its blood supply. It chokes. It outran its own veins.

Slavery works people to death faster than it replaces them. It collapses. It burned the hands that built it.

Coercion burns out the people it depends on. It collapses. It turned its own engine into scrap.

Injustice takes more than it gives. It collapses. The grain runs against it.

## The Evidence

History is a graveyard of systems that ate their own foundations.

Rome conquered. It took gold, grain, men. It never replaced them. It ran out of money. It ran out of soldiers. It fell. The empire choked on its own appetite.

The American South built an economy on slavery. Cliometric evidence (Fogel & Engerman, 1974) finds large slave plantations were more efficient than free Southern farms — if that holds, the South is not a clean self-collapse case like Rome or the Soviet Union. It fell to military defeat, not exhausted fuel. The clean cases are the ones that ran out on their own terms.

The Soviet Union took grain from starving peasants. It fed machines. The peasants died. The machines had no one left to run them. The system collapsed. It had eaten its own hands.

Ponzi schemes pay old investors with new money. New investors dry up. The scheme collapses. It was always a snake eating its own tail.

Drug cartels destroy the communities they sell to. Eventually no one buys. No one sells. The market dies. The parasite killed its host.

Companies burn out their workers. They run out of skilled people. They collapse. They turned their own talent into ash.

## The Falsifier

Show me a system that consumes its own resources and keeps going forever. You cannot. No one can.

Show me injustice that creates more of what it needs as it goes. You cannot. Injustice is a furnace with no chimney. It fills the room with smoke.

Show me people who feel nothing when you exploit them. You cannot. Conscience is the grain speaking through them. You cannot silence it forever.

Show me a universe that rewards waste. You cannot. The grain runs the other way. It always has.

## The Uncertainty

The exact breaking point varies. Every system carries its own timer. You cannot see the clock. But the clock ticks.

We do not know why some people hear conscience and others do not. We do not know why some systems collapse in decades and others in centuries. We do not know the full shape of the grain.

Status: open.


## The Convergence

Injustice is not a moral exception. It is a [thermodynamic pattern](/a/convergence-c01) — suppressed dissipation, maintained by continuous energy input. The same mathematics that governs rivers and neurons governs the ethics of extraction.

