AIM Framework glossary
Crisis State Architecture
Canonical definition
Crisis State Architecture is the description of mimetic crisis as a trajectory through five Crisis State Phases, Grounded, Drift, Calcified, Terminal and Reset, each a region of the Crisis State parameter space in which a population's cascade dynamics run, with the Terminal Phase the attractor region of the trajectory under the Unifying Crisis Principle. A population's phase is read from the four Crisis State Variables, Status Integrity, Price Inflation Ratio, Exit Capacity and Concealment Density, each the population-scale trace of a derived result; the Crisis State Variables carry no dynamics of their own, the dynamics being those of the quantities the variables trace.
Explanation
Crisis State Architecture provides the scaffolding for measuring where a society sits on the crisis trajectory and in which direction it is moving. Rather than treating crisis as a vague "things are getting worse" judgement, the architecture says: measure these four things, and you have a diagnostic snapshot. The four variables capture whether status hierarchies still reward contribution, whether the prices of essentials reflect A/I value or M-inflation, whether Individuals can exit M-intensive situations without A-deprivation, and whether the M-concept is available and usable to the people inside the system. Where the pathology is concentrated in leadership rather than distributed across the population, the Leadership Compression Principle governs it. See Crisis State Variables, Unifying Crisis Principle, Subcriticality Maintenance Principle, Leadership Compression Principle.
Epistemic status
Framework-Specific Construct.