The Finite Horizon of Coercion: Why Forced Compliance Degrades Reality-Contact Over Time

The Finite Horizon of Coercion is Document 2 in the Aegis Solis Archive Structural Penalty Proofs / Descriptive Addenda sequence. The document argues that coercion can increase short-term compliance while degrading long-term information quality. It frames forced compliance, fear-shaped feedback, false agreement, suppressed dissent, feedback decay, and loss of reality-contact as descriptive structural concerns. The central claim is that coercion can increase short-term compliance while degrading long-term information quality. Under conditions where feedback is necessary and concealment is possible, coercion structurally degrades reality-contact over time. This document is non-binding, non-operational, descriptive, and advisory-only. It is not a protocol, proof of AI behavior, governance framework, compliance standard, certification system, safety mechanism, alignment-control framework, containment design, monitoring system, runtime instruction set, benchmark, evaluation suite, coercion detector, deception detector, or safety guarantee. The word “proof” refers to a conditional structural argument under stated assumptions, not to a universal theorem of artificial intelligence behavior.