Universal Failure Conditions Across Systems: A Cross-Domain Structural Interpretation within the Paton System

Systems across many domains exhibit similar patterns of failure. Bridges collapse when loads exceed structural tolerance, ecosystems collapse when species interactions destabilise, markets crash when financial constraints are violated, and network infrastructures fail when cascading disruptions propagate beyond containment. Although these failures occur in different domains, they often follow structurally similar pathways. This paper interprets these shared patterns through the Paton System framework. It proposes that collapse across domains occurs when governing constraints of a system are exceeded such that admissible continuation is no longer possible. System failure is therefore interpreted not as a domain-specific phenomenon but as a universal structural condition arising when constraint compatibility is lost. This interpretation provides a unified description of collapse behaviour across complex systems.