The Law of Alignment: A Structural Meta-Constraint on Viability and Persistence Across Systems

This work formalizes the Law of Alignment as a structural meta-constraint governing the persistence and viability of systems across physical, biological, psychological, social, and ecological domains. While established laws describe how systems behave, they do not specify the conditions under which systems persist as coherent entities rather than collapse or dissipate. This article addresses that gap by introducing alignment as a domain-independent viability condition linking accumulation, integration capacity, and dissemination (release). A formal structural model is presented in which system persistence depends on maintaining proportional alignment between accumulation and the combined capacities for integration and dissemination. The framework defines explicit viability domains, misalignment regimes, and collapse thresholds, rendering the theory operational, testable, and falsifiable as a meta-constraint on existence rather than a competing mechanistic law. The Law of Alignment is situated within established systems and viability frameworks—including autopoiesis, the Free Energy Principle, cybernetics, resilience theory, and complex systems science—demonstrating its non-redundancy and higher-order explanatory role. The model reframes collapse not as anomalous failure but as a lawful outcome of structural misalignment, and persistence as a conditional achievement rather than a guaranteed product of lawfulness. This work proposes alignment as a unifying structural principle that conditions the relevance of all laws by governing whether systems remain viable contexts in which lawful dynamics can meaningfully operate. Files