PhronesisCompulsive system-creation is the compulsive response to any complexity, uncertainty, or disorder by constructing elaborate organizational frameworks rather than engaging directly with situations. We formalize this pattern within attractor-basin theory, characterizing it as a wrong attractor W that draws individuals away from ground state S^0—calibrated adaptive organization—through a self-reinforcing architecture we term the Framework-Building Architecture (FBA).
The FBA generates systematic framework-construction as a primary mechanism for managing chaos-anxiety, but the resulting structures incur overhead, foreclose fluid response, and ultimately intensify the disorder they were built to contain. We introduce the Fluid-Response Foreclosure Basin (FRFB) as the complementary mechanism: a constraint on direct, improvisational engagement with situations that deepens as the FBA matures.
Through nine propositions, we trace the disorder-anxiety primacy that initiates framework-building (P1), the system as anxiety container (P2), the substitution of meta-work for real work (P3), architect-identity lock-in (P4), proliferating system overhead (P5), the diagnostic distinction between useful and compulsive systems (P6), the necessity of direct engagement for return (P7), gradual recalibration through tolerance-of-disorder practice (P8), and the stability properties of S^0 as light-touch adaptive organization (P9).
The paper closes with a discussion of clinical implications and the phenomenology of dismantle.