Apex M-Dysfunction

Canonical definition

The pathology that arises when an Individual whose dominant motivational weighting is Mimetic, and who cannot recognise it because Source Opacity hides it from introspection and the M-Hypothesis is absent, ascends a Status hierarchy to its apex. Status is constituted as a differential rather than as a level, so at the apex the ordinary means of increasing it, ascent, is exhausted: no higher position remains to be occupied, and no move against anyone at the same level improves the differential. The differential can then be widened in one direction only, by depressing the standing of others. Individuals of proximate Status continue to function as Models, since the Observer reads them exactly as it did during the ascent; what changes is their classification, from Model whose valuations are worth adopting to rival whose standing must be reduced. The pathology is therefore not the apex holder's discomfort but the action the architecture makes available to them: the only remaining move on the Mimetic channel is the exercise of whatever power the position confers to force competitors down. Apex M-Dysfunction operates in principle at the apex of any Status hierarchy, and its severity scales with the power the position confers rather than with the holder's disposition. It is most dangerous in the polity, where the power is executive and the limit of the move is the destruction of the competitor and the suppression of everyone below, which is why the recurrent historical pattern of autocratic violence is its clearest instance. The pathology is expressed only where the holder is also Captured: an apex holder who retains Intrinsic domains outside the pursuit of standing has somewhere to go and does not need the move.