Article 5.Structural Tension and the Visibility of Loss

This article examines the structural mechanism by which organised systems conceal moral loss — and the consequences of that concealment for accountability and legitimacy. The point of departure is the Closure Theorem of the Moral Field (T1), established in the article "The Asymmetry Problem: Causal Action Without Moral Agency in Delegated Systems": delegation does not sever the connection between a decision and its consequences. Yet if this connection structurally persists, why does it so often remain invisible? The central thesis: suppressing the visibility of loss does not eliminate it — it accumulates moral tension within the system (S6). That tension neither vanishes nor dissipates. It builds until the system is forced to acknowledge the concealed losses or collapses under their weight. Principles S1, S4, S6, and S7 describe this dynamic together: from epistemic incompleteness, through the indestructibility of loss, to the structural gap between reality and the model — and on to the question of legitimacy as transparency of the link between decision, consequence, and bearer of responsibility.