SΔϕ-58 — Cost Attribution Symmetry Index

SΔϕ-58 introduces the Cost Attribution Symmetry Index, CASI, within the Sofience-Δϕ Formalism as a framework for evaluating group risk without relying on surface labels such as religion, cult, sect, ideology, movement, or community. Instead of asking whether a group’s belief is true, false, orthodox, or deviant, this paper asks how benefits and costs are distributed, delayed, internalized, externalized, audited, and repaired within the group’s operational structure. The central claim is that all benefit stands upon a rearrangement of cost attribution. A group becomes structurally risky not because its beliefs are unfamiliar, sacred, supernatural, or intense, but because benefits may be concentrated in leadership, institutions, central authorities, or symbolic systems while costs are deferred, transferred, silenced, spiritualized, or externalized onto members, dissenters, families, vulnerable participants, future victims, or afterlife compensation claims. From this perspective, ethical evaluation shifts from belief-content judgment to cost-attribution analysis. The paper proposes CASI as a multidimensional index for evaluating cost-attribution symmetry across group structures. It includes indicators such as Benefit-Cost Coupling, Restabilization Duty, Exit and Refusal Preservation, Audit Evidence Visibility, Authority Editability, Failure-to-Signal Path, Vulnerability Protection Ratio, Deferred Compensation Dependence, and Sacred Marker Closure. It further introduces evidence grades ranging from public observation to enforcement-level investigation, distinguishing what can be responsibly assessed by individual researchers, theologians, journalists, auditors, civil society groups, and public authorities. SΔϕ-58 also adds an internal audit layer. It distinguishes external assessment from internal self-audit and introduces the Internal Audit Credibility Score, Audit Gap Index, and Audit Trust Coefficient to evaluate how a group observes, records, contests, and repairs its own cost-attribution failures. A gap between internal and external evaluation is not treated as proof of guilt or danger by itself. However, when such a gap lacks verification, re-entry, correction, or independent audit pathways, it becomes a structural signal of reduced trustworthiness. This document does not function as a legal determination, theological judgment, anti-religious classification, or automatic cult-detection tool. It is a measurement grammar for identifying how costs move beneath claims of truth, salvation, loyalty, sacrifice, community, obedience, benefit, and sacred value. Its purpose is to make visible whether a group preserves refusal, protects dissent, repairs harm, allows audit, and prevents deferred or sacred compensation claims from blocking present cost-attribution redesign.