The Governance Ignorance Substrate formalizes the foundational systems‑level condition underlying all SignalRupture (SR) institutional cognition analysis: governance systems structurally depend upon selective omission of behavioural complexity in order to remain operationally viable. Drawing on cross‑domain SR empirical findings, the paper demonstrates that behavioural complexity routinely exceeds institutional cognitive capacity, producing necessary omission, administrative abstraction, and representational stabilization. The paper introduces a formal substrate model in which behavioural complexity (B), institutional capacity (C), omission (O), abstraction (A), and stabilization (S) form a recursive transformation sequence: B O A S This model explains why governance systems across unrelated domains—homelessness governance, policing, welfare adjudication, psychiatry, corrections, emergency medicine, addictions response, and education—exhibit recurrent patterns of compression, drift, abstraction, and stabilization. The paper positions structured ignorance not as a moral or procedural failure, but as a systems‑level necessity emerging from finite institutional cognition.
Signal Rupture (Fri,) studied this question.