Starting postulate: Every living system, regardless of scale, tends towards coherence rather than stability.
By living system is meant here any system capable of processing information, self-regulating, adapting under constraint and maintaining a functional continuity over time. This definition is strictly functional.
Coherence designates the dynamic compatibility between the elements of a system. It implies neither permanent harmony, nor absence of conflict, nor frozen equilibrium. A coherent system is never frozen. It remains metastable.
1. Fundamental Principle
Instability is a functional condition, not a dysfunction. Disagreement is information, not an anomaly. Tension is a signal of adjustment, not a failure. Division is a symptom of failed integration, not a primary cause.
The suppression of these elements does not produce order. It produces a deferred disorganisation, often invisible in the short term, but systemic in the long term.
2. Disagreement and Information
Disagreement constitutes a vital function of information circulation. It signals that an element or constraint is no longer integrated into the global coherence. When disagreement is disqualified, the information does not disappear. It displaces, rigidifies or manifests as ruptures.
3. Survival Mode and Domination
When a system can no longer integrate its own tensions, it switches to survival mode. This mode is characterised by confusion between signal and threat, search for immediate stability, reduction of complexity, neutralisation of disagreement.
Domination is not necessarily a conscious project. It constitutes a functional survival strategy of a system overwhelmed by its own informational complexity.
4. Self-Organisation and Creative Chaos
In systems far from equilibrium, order is not imposed. It emerges. Creative chaos does not designate a destructive disorder, but a transitional phase of indeterminacy during which a new level of coherence can appear.
5. Individual Psyche
Psychic suffering cannot be reduced to an individual defect. It frequently functions as the signal of an internalised systemic incoherence. When the environment demands a conformity incompatible with lived experience, the subject splits in order to survive.
6. Functional Sorting Principle
Each principle is evaluated by a single question: does it increase the capacity of a living system to integrate instability, disagreement and conflicting information without producing lasting fragmentation?
7. Global Diagnosis
The contemporary world system seeks stability while actively undermining the conditions of its own coherence. Current crises are the interconnected symptoms of a single system in advanced decoherence.
Conclusion
A living system does not collapse from external attack, but from the accumulation of unintegrated incoherences. Coherence cannot be imposed. It can only emerge. The coherence of the living is neither an ideal nor a belief. It is a functional principle of viability.