The Boundary Vacuum Law: Gradient, Boundary Failure, Topological Flow, and Pressure Capture in Social Systems

The Boundary Vacuum Law: Gradient, Boundary Failure, Topological Flow, and Pressure Capture in Social Systems Civilization Physics — Series: System Stability Series This article proposes the Boundary Vacuum Law as a structure-level law of social systems. When a functional gradient remains active and the relevant boundary fails, pressure does not remain suspended. Responsibility, authority, emotional labor, military burden, narrative control, or epistemic validation flows toward whichever node is exposed, permeable, proximate, legitimate, forceful, or available enough to absorb it. The central claim is that many apparent moral, relational, organizational, geopolitical, and AI-governance failures are better understood as structural capture events. A vacuum is not empty space; it is an unregulated gradient. Once a system remains coupled and boundary integrity weakens, unresolved pressure redistributes through the topology until the gradient is reduced, the boundary is repaired, or the topology changes. The article develops this argument through several linked mechanisms: Boundary failure allows unresolved gradients to move across roles, interfaces, institutions, or systems. Capture-flow intensity rises when gradient pressure and absorptive capacity are high while effective boundary integrity is low. Subject-position stability depends on local boundary integrity, autonomy, system-level gradient pressure, and exposure to the failing interface. Role drift appears when actors are pulled beyond their proper bandwidth: partner into therapist, child into mediator, employee into shadow manager, ally into guarantor, or AI interface into epistemic authority. Durable solutions require boundary repair, interface redesign, or topological separation rather than exhortation alone. The law complements the Universal Inbreeding Law: one describes decay by excessive closure, while the other describes capture by insufficient boundary regulation. This article clarifies why weak boundaries do not merely create disorder. They often create counterfeit order by drafting nearby actors into unauthorized substitution. The system appears stabilized because someone or something absorbs the pressure, but the result is usually dependency, exhaustion, capture, or hidden fragility. The Boundary Vacuum Law therefore provides a unified structural account of pressure capture across intimate relations, family systems, organizations, collective action, geopolitics, cognitive-narrative systems, and AI governance.