Starting postulate: the viability of a living system depends on its capacity to maintain a functional coherence throughout its transformations.
The word living here designates organisms able to process information, to regulate themselves, to adapt under constraint and to preserve a functional continuity. Applying this grid to social organisations remains an analogical extension that must be examined according to the properties proper to each system.
Coherence corresponds to the dynamic compatibility between the functions, constraints and exchanges that make that continuity possible. It implies neither permanent harmony, nor absence of conflict, nor a frozen equilibrium. A viable system can go through tensions and change state without losing what secures its organisation.
Instability, tension and information
A variation can disturb functioning or provide the information required to adjust it. Its significance depends on its intensity, its duration and the capacities of response available. Seeking to remove all instability sometimes deprives a system of the fluctuations that allow it to learn, while too strong an instability can exceed its margins and cause a rupture.
In a human organisation, disagreement often fulfils a comparable function. It reveals a gap between the experience of part of the system and the representation that guides the decision. Disqualifying it does not resolve that gap. The information may then shift towards conflicts, workarounds or silent withdrawal.
Rigidification and survival mode
When a system has fewer and fewer resources for integrating its tensions, it tends to favour immediate responses. It reduces the diversity of interpretations, tightens control and more readily treats a signal as a threat. This rigidification can provisionally restore an appearance of order while reducing the possibilities of correction.
Domination is not always a conscious project. It can also emerge from an organisation that protects its procedures, its positions or its narratives because it can no longer process the complexity they were meant to frame.
Self-organisation and the psyche
Systems far from equilibrium can produce new forms of organisation. That possibility does not turn every disorder into a creative force. A transition opens several trajectories, some of which reinforce viability while others lead to fragmentation.
At the individual scale, psychological suffering may be linked to biological, relational, social or historical factors. The systemic approach examines their interactions and the way a person adapts to their environment. It avoids automatically attributing the difficulty to an isolated defect in the individual, without thereby replacing clinical assessment.
Principle of functional sorting
A rule, a practice or an institution can be assessed by its capacity to integrate variations, disagreements and conflicting information while preserving the continuity of the system and its possibilities of correction.
This grid does not reduce all contemporary crises to a single cause. It makes it possible to look for common dependencies, displaced costs and responses that locally stabilise a situation while weakening the whole in the longer term.
Conclusion
A system can be destroyed by an external perturbation, by the accumulation of internal tensions or by their combination. Its viability depends on the quality of the relations that maintain its functions, on its margins for adaptation and on its capacity to turn information into correction. The coherence of living systems designates that functional property. It constitutes a research framework whose mechanisms and limits must remain testable.