AIM Framework glossary
Push-Pull Obligation Principle
Canonical definition
Interpersonal obligation beyond Appetitive sufficiency is stable in one direction only. It is stable as push, self-initiated outward from the duty-bearer's capacity, and unstable as pull, extracted inward on the claimant's felt entitlement. Five established results entail this: Mimetic Desire carries no satiation signal, so any structure admitting M-driven demand installs a self-escalating infrastructure in which each concession resets the baseline; Coercion is the weaponisation of M-dynamics or the exploitation of Appetitive deficit to override I-led choice, so any structure treating refusal as moral or relational fault is coercive whatever language dresses it; Freedom requires that Intrinsic Motivation lead, so an obligation structure must preserve the duty-bearer's I-leadership rather than replace it with compliance; Cascading Support fixes the direction of Appetitive duty as outward from capacity; and Source Opacity with Confabulation denies the claimant introspective access to whether a felt entitlement is Appetitively grounded or Mimetically generated, so no architecture can admit the good demand while excluding the Mimetic one. Jointly these entail that the only stable interpersonal architecture beyond Appetitive sufficiency is push-predominant, with Demand withdrawn as a mode and the clean Ask retained as polarity-neutral coordination, on an institutionally guaranteed Appetitive floor.
Explanation
Giving is stable and demanding is not. Not because demanding is unkind, but because the source that generates demands has no stopping point, and no architecture can screen the legitimate demand from the Mimetic one: the tag that would separate them is unavailable to the person making the demand. They are not lying. They cannot tell. "Obligation" ordinarily names something a society could elect or decline. Some obligations are not elected. A parent who wants the child to live must feed it, and the must is fixed by the world rather than by anyone's say-so. This obligation is of that kind. A society that wants to avoid the supercritical Mimetic cascade must run interpersonal obligation on the push polarity and must guarantee the Appetitive floor, conditionally on wanting the outcome, in exactly the way the parent must feed the child. That the push polarity feels wrong is a prediction of the account rather than evidence against it. Source Opacity guarantees that the true direction of an interpersonal flow is the direction the architecture conceals from the parties to it, so the entailed polarity is the one the architecture's own intuitions will not endorse.
Epistemic status
Framework-Specific Principle (architecturally entailed).
Derivation
Chapter 18, Section 18.10; compressed derivation at Appendix 18B, Section 18B.2; formal statement at Appendix A, Section A.6.5; dyadic ground at Chapter 9, Section 9.19.