Boundary-Hardening Principle

Canonical definition

The Boundary-Hardening Principle is the derived result that exporting the maintenance Cost of a Boundary-Belief onto those it places outside its boundary raises the endogenous coupling of the domain it encloses and thereby lengthens the holder-measured Decoherence Time (Chapter 14, Section 14.7.7), converting a decoherence that would otherwise discharge continuously and at low cost into one stored behind a hardened membrane and released as a single violent fold when the boundary finally gives. Because the act that exports the Cost is the act that hardens the boundary, the ethical wrong of imposing the Cost on outsiders and the stability hazard of a stored catastrophic decoherence are one and the same act; and because higher endogenous coupling lengthens the holder-measured Decoherence Time, the harder the falsehood the longer it persists and the more violent its eventual fold. The fold re-internalises only the stored fraction of the decoherence onto the holder; the fraction already exported onto the excluded party is borne continuously and is not recovered. The corrective is the mirror image: declining to export the Cost keeps the membrane permeable and lets the Belief decohere gently and continuously. Derived at Chapter 14 as a corollary of the Saddle-Node Default in the Bubble-and-Foam Model.