Identity over Survival: When Groups Sacrifice Survival to Preserve Identity

When does a population act against its material interest — to the point of accepting collective extinction — rather than make an accommodation that would relieve the pressure? This paper treats the phenomenon, exemplified by the Byzantine refusal of union with the Latin Church before 1453, as distinct from the extreme pro-group self-sacrifice that identity-fusion theory explains: it is a group sacrificing its survival to preserve its identity, not the self for the group. It specifies five structural conditions under which the refusal arises — material degradation without replacement, the absence of an alternative identity-carrier, a structurally present Other, a specific accommodation forbidden by the group's documented pre-crisis doctrine, and a duration across generations sufficient for the refusal to be inherited rather than chosen — and argues that the last two jointly mark a commitment as constitutive rather than instrumental: the documented prohibition as the antecedent that can be verified in advance, the generational depth as its absorption into structure. The conditions are illustrated through a structured comparison of refusal cases (Byzantium, the Old Believers, the Samaritans), a boundary case (Pharaonic Egypt under foreign rule), and a negative case (the Classic Maya), and are shown to predict not only the onset of refusal but its dissolution when they lapse. The criterion is then put to a controlled, configurational test on cases chosen without reference to the outcome — religious communities under the Soviet anti-religious campaign, where one regime made a single broadly uniform demand — analysed in the manner of qualitative comparative analysis, with consistency and coverage reported. The test locates the reach of the account: the prior prohibition discriminates refusal from accommodation with a consistency of roughly four in five, but is neither necessary nor sufficient; the remaining conditions fix the scope of the phenomenon or govern the choice of exit; and the configuration supplies the availability of refusal without determining its enactment, for within a single tradition communities sharing every condition divide between those that refuse and those that comply — and they divide over whether their own inherited doctrine forbids the accommodation at all. That contest over the binding force of a shared inheritance, which a structural account can locate but not resolve, marks the boundary of structural explanation for the phenomenon — and identifying it, on cases not selected for their outcome, is the paper's central result. This paper is part of the Coupling Geometry research programme. The programme's axiomatic foundation is presented in a companion paper (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20138144) and its civilisational empirical base in a second (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20137863); the Byzantine refusal treated here as one case is developed at length as a single-case study in a third (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20140587). The present paper states its account so as to stand on the structural criterion and the comparison independently of that framework.