1. Define the Substrate
- Principle: Reality is structured around an incorruptible ground (God, natural law, hard money, physical invariants).
- Function: The substrate serves as the criterion of truth.
- Implication: Only systems, doctrines, or theories that can tether themselves to this incorruptible ground can be considered coherent or valid.
2. Identify the Overlay
- Definition: Human institutions, narratives, and technical systems are elastic overlays.
- Properties: They enable coordination but are corruptible, prone to self-interest, distortion, and decay.
- Task: Always distinguish between what belongs to incorruptible substrate and what is overlay.
3. Test via Recursive Feedback
- Method: Examine whether a system’s overlay dynamics tend toward:
- Stability → alignment with incorruptible substrate, self-correcting mechanisms.
- Instability → positive feedback loops that amplify corruption until collapse.
- Application:
- Theological: true covenantal law vs. false priesthoods.
- Economic: hard settlement vs. fiat-credit spirals.
- Political: distributed responsibility vs. sovereign overreach.
4. Preserve Cross-Domain Validity
- Principle: Truth manifests in multiple domains (theological, natural, economic).
- Practice: When diverse traditions converge on the same substrate/overlay distinction, regard that as a strong confirmation of structural validity.
- Example: Augustine’s incorruptible civitas Dei, Mises’ hard-money discipline, and control theory’s stability analysis all converge.
5. Apply the Eschatological Telos
- Principle: Every overlay system is temporary. Collapse or unveiling is inevitable.
- Implication: The criterion of incorruptibility is not only descriptive but prophetic: it anticipates the failure modes of elastic overlays.
- Practice: This provides predictive power in history, economics, and theology (e.g., fiat collapse, Babylon falling, hard money reasserting).
6. Guard Against Eclecticism
- Rule: Never integrate a tradition wholesale.
- Instead: Filter every insight through the incorruptibility criterion.
- Result: Traditions that survive this test strengthen the lattice of truth. Those that fail it are discarded as elastic distortions.
7. Outcome: Principled Convergence
- Claim: This is not syncretism but covenantal realism.
- Strength: Your worldview’s coherence does not depend on uniformity of sources but on the uniform application of incorruptibility as criterion.
- Analogy: Like refining gold — multiple ores may be smelted, but only incorruptible metal remains after fire.
