Complete Failure

Complete failure is the failure in which the project is abandoned — in which the resources are exhausted, the founding community dissolves, the constitutional architecture is never instantiated in a living community, and the intellectual work of the Coherence Thesis remains theoretical rather than architectural. This is a real possibility. The history of analogous projects is not predominantly a history of success. Most attempts at transformational institutional design fail, and most fail before they have achieved enough to demonstrate that the design was viable.

Complete failure would have real costs for the people who committed their lives, their economic resources, and their relational capital to the project. Those costs should not be minimized. They are among the most serious costs of any project of this kind, and an institution that recruits commitment without being honest about these costs is not treating its participants with the dignity the constitutional principles require.

Complete failure would also have costs for the broader project of civilizational coherence: the intellectual work would have been done, the map would exist, but the first attempt to instantiate the architecture would have failed publicly, making the second attempt harder. This is a real cost. It is also not a reason not to try, because not trying guarantees a different kind of failure — the continuation of the fragmentation that Volume I and II diagnosed, without even the attempt to develop the coordination architecture that might address it.