The Sacrifice Pattern
Summary
This post formalizes sacrifice as a structural attractor in optimizing systems with standing asymmetry: when some entities have agency but lack sovereign standing, their agency loss becomes an efficient control variable. The pattern emerges independent of intent—systems stabilize on hidden sacrificial substrates (captive labor, dependency traps, non-consensual option-space collapse) because optimization pressure makes agency reduction instrumentally useful. Only explicit agency-conserving constraints can prevent this attractor. Connects to Alignment III’s attractor dynamics and responsibility attribution (RAT) from Alignment IV.
Key Concepts
- Sacrifice as structural attractor
- Standing asymmetry enabling agency-loss as control variable
- Optimization-driven convergence independent of malice
- Hidden sacrificial substrates
- Agency-conserving constraints as prevention