Feedback Integrity Theory

This manuscript develops Feedback Integrity Theory, a formal, ideology-independent operator framework for analyzing institutional self-correction. Instead of relying on sociological, moral, or political labels, the theory treats institutional failure strictly as an information routing problem, examining the structural fidelity of correction-bearing information as it moves through a system. The framework defines primitive operators—including restriction, penalty, exclusion, and message propagation—and derives higher-order dynamics like coercion and dissent suppression as mathematical compositions of these primitives. It isolates a fundamental, measurable institutional failure mode: when disagreement-bearing information becomes costly, public reports systematically diverge from private states. As this public-private divergence grows, institutions inevitably suffer from "reality decoupling." The institutional update mechanisms cease responding to external environmental evidence and instead optimize strictly against a hallucinated measurement environment constructed by their own corrupted feedback channels. Furthermore, the manuscript introduces a Local Feedback Zeta Formalism to mathematically count and map the exponential proliferation of suppressive operator pathways within localized domains. Ultimately, Feedback Integrity Theory provides a falsifiable, predictive framework for detecting when an institution—whether a corporation, university, political party, or agency—has crossed the critical threshold where it loses the capacity to know that it is wrong.