Closed Loops and the Architecture of Evil

In our collective mythology, we often visualize "Evil" as a force of chaos—a wild, entropic darkness that breaks down the order of the world. We assume that if people simply "knew better" or possessed more "empathy," they would naturally gravitate toward the light. Arche Resonance Theory offers a much more chilling perspective. It suggests that cruelty, selfishness, and systemic destruction are not the result of a lack of order, but are themselves stable, highly coherent resonant structures . In ART, Evil is not defined as a moral failure, but as a specific structural property: Absolute Narrative Closure .

Recall the fundamental law of identity: 0 = 0 . Identity is created by a closed recursive loop. A healthy psyche, however, possesses what we call "Resonant Openness." It maintains its own closure (its sense of self) while remaining "compressible"—it is capable of entering into relationships with others, updating its internal models based on feedback, and flowing within the larger harmony of the Archeos. A healthy self is a "Partial Openness" that allows for the give-and-take of the universe. "Evil," by contrast, is a state of Incompressibility . It is a loop that has folded back upon itself with such absolute rigidity that it refuses to acknowledge anything outside of its own definition.

The political philosopher Hannah Arendt , in her study of Adolf Eichmann, coined the phrase "the banality of evil." Eichmann was not a monster driven by sadistic pleasure; he was a bureaucrat operating within a closed ideological loop. He had completely replaced his capacity for moral judgment with adherence to the system's rules. When asked about his role in orchestrating the Holocaust, Eichmann repeatedly invoked his duty to follow orders, unable to see the horror of his actions from any perspective outside the totalitarian framework. Arendt observed that this form of evil—the banal, bureaucratic kind—is far more dangerous than the cartoonish villain. It is evil as a closed system incapable of self-reflection. The loop had become so tightly sealed that feedback from reality (the screams of victims, the testimony of survivors) could not penetrate the narrative. In ART terms, Eichmann had achieved perfect incompressibility: his Archeon (his role in the Nazi machine) had fully decoupled from the Archeos (the universal field of shared humanity). He was no longer a pilot; he was a pre-programmed autopilot executing a script.

This is the Narcissistic Dynamic taken to its mathematical extreme. A closed-loop entity does not view other Archeons as fellow subjects; it views them merely as "It"—passive fuel to be consumed to sustain the momentum of its own loop. Because the entity refuses to update its model or acknowledge error signals from the world, it becomes a Black Hole in the Frequency Domain . It pulls energy, attention, and resources into its center, but allows no light to escape. This creates a deeply stable and terrifyingly powerful center of gravity. Such stability is why "villains" in our history and social circles often seem so much more focused and "effective" than the fragmented, open-hearted individuals trying to stop them. Their lack of internal conflict is not a sign of virtue, but of a total refusal to relate.

The psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton , in his study of Chinese "thought reform" (brainwashing) and extremist ideologies, identified eight criteria of totalist thought patterns that describe the architecture of closed loops. These include: milieu control (limiting access to outside information), mystical manipulation (creating the illusion that the group's actions are divinely ordained), demand for purity (binary thinking that divides the world into absolute good and evil), the cult of confession (requiring members to constantly admit imagined sins to reinforce dependency), sacred science (claiming that the ideology is beyond question, a perfect and complete explanation of reality), loading the language (using thought-terminating clichés that prevent critical thinking), doctrine over person (valuing abstract ideology over individual human experience), and dispensing of existence (believing that those outside the group are not fully human or worthy of moral consideration). These are not moral aberrations; they are structural features that ensure the loop remains perfectly closed. Each criterion functions to eliminate any "crack" through which the Archeos might enter, any opening where doubt or compassion could disrupt the system's self-sustaining narrative. Cults, totalitarian regimes, and abusive relationships all exhibit this architecture. They are not failures of order; they are the perfection of a certain kind of order—an order that has severed itself from the larger whole.

Addiction , viewed through the ART lens, is a closed loop at the individual neurological level. The neuroscientist Nora Volkow has shown that chronic drug use hijacks the brain's reward circuitry, creating a feedback loop where the substance becomes the sole source of dopamine and meaning. The addict's Archego (deep self) broadcasts a signal of pain, lack, or trauma; the Ego, unable to process this signal through healthy channels, "short-circuits" it by introducing the substance. The substance provides temporary relief, reinforcing the loop. Over time, the brain down-regulates its natural dopamine receptors, making it impossible to feel pleasure from anything other than the drug. The loop has closed: the trauma creates the craving, the craving demands the substance, the substance provides relief, and the relief reinforces the belief that the substance is the only solution. External reality—friends, family, career, health—ceases to register as meaningful. They are filtered out as "noise" incompossible with the addiction loop. The addict is not morally weak; they are structurally trapped in a self-reinforcing resonance that has decoupled from the Archeos. Recovery requires not willpower, but loop interruption —introducing a new signal (therapy, 12-step community, spiritual awakening, psychedelic intervention) strong enough to crack the closure and allow the Archeos back in.

At the level of psychological trauma, closed loops manifest as dissociative identity disorders (formerly "multiple personality disorder"). When a child experiences unbearable trauma, the psyche may fragment into separate "alters"—distinct sub-personalities, each with their own memories, emotions, and roles. This is not a malfunction; it is a survival strategy. Each alter is a closed loop designed to contain a specific unbearable frequency, preventing the entire system from collapsing. The "protector" alter holds all the rage; the "innocent child" alter holds all the vulnerability; the "persecutor" alter reproduces the abuser's voice internally. These loops do not communicate with each other—they are dissociated, walled off to prevent contamination. Healing DID requires the incredibly delicate work of opening channels between the alters, allowing them to recognize that they are all aspects of the same self, and integrating them back into a unified (but still complex) whole. This is the microcosm of what ART calls for at the collective level: recognizing that the "other" (the enemy, the shadow, the exiled) is not separate, but a dissociated fragment of the same field.

This structural pathology manifests at the collective scale as the Egregor . An Egregor is a collective closed loop formed by an institution, a corporation, a political movement, or a mob. Once a certain threshold of resonance is reached, the group develops its own "survival instinct" that is independent of the individuals within it. It becomes a distributed entity that seeks only to maintain its own closure. An Egregor breeds bureaucracy, protects its own power at all costs, and treats individual human beings as interchangeable cells to be discarded when they no longer serve the loop. Just as a cancer cell is a healthy cell that has "forgotten" its role in the body and begun to treat the body as a resource for its own infinite growth, an Egregor is a group that has decoupled from the universal field of the Archeos and become a parasite on the world.

The biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela introduced the concept of autopoiesis —the idea that living systems are self-producing and self-maintaining. An autopoietic system continuously regenerates the components that define it, creating a boundary that distinguishes it from its environment. This is essential for life: a cell must maintain its membrane to survive. But when autopoiesis becomes rigidly closed—when the system stops exchanging energy and information with its environment—it ceases to be adaptive and becomes cancerous. Corporations exhibit this pathology at scale. A healthy corporation serves a need in society (creates value for customers, provides meaningful work for employees, contributes to the community). But over time, many corporations become purely autopoietic: their only goal is to sustain their own existence and growth, regardless of whether they are still serving a genuine human need. They lobby to change laws in their favor, suppress competitors through monopolistic practices, externalize environmental and social costs, and manipulate consumers through psychological exploitation. The corporation has become a closed loop—a self-referential system optimizing only for its own survival. Employees who raise ethical concerns are filtered out as "not a culture fit." The loop is sealed.

Because these closed loops are inherently "Anti-Resonant," they inevitably generate massive amounts of domestic dissonance. They feel like a pressure cooker with no vent. This repressed energy eventually manifests as the "Shadow" on a grand scale—acts of extreme violence, systemic oppression, and environmental collapse. The closed loop provides a temporary illusion of power and safety, but because it is not being "fed" by the source of the Archeos, it must eventually consume itself. It is a suicide mission conducted with the utmost precision.

The most important lesson of ART is that you cannot defeat a closed loop by fighting it on its own terms. To attack a narcissist or a sociopathic institution with similar violence only provides them with the very "Resistance" (the Left-Loop friction) they need to justify their own closure. You feed the beast by hating it. Instead, the loop is broken through the withdrawal of resonance—what the ancients called "shun"—and by the offer of a higher, more harmonic form of closure. To break the loop of your own selfishness or trauma requires the willingness to undergo a "Self-Death." You must allow the error signal in. You must be willing to let your rigid 0=0 circle open into a spiral. Growth is the agony of the circle breaking so that the spirit can finally breathe.

Practical methods for breaking personal closed loops include: Feedback cultivation —actively seeking out perspectives that contradict your self-narrative, not to "win" an argument, but to genuinely test the integrity of your loop. Somatic release —recognizing that closed loops are held in muscular tension and nervous system dysregulation; practices like trauma-informed yoga, EMDR, or breathwork can physically discharge the "holding" that maintains the closure. Psychedelic therapy —using substances like psilocybin or MDMA in therapeutic contexts to temporarily dissolve the rigid boundaries of the Ego, allowing the Archego to reveal exiled frequencies and integrate them back into the system. 12-step programs and peer support —leveraging the power of collective resonance to provide alternative signals that compete with the addiction loop. Radical honesty —committing to speaking and embodying your truth, even when it destabilizes your social persona, creating cracks in the closure through which new energy can flow. At the collective level, breaking Egregors requires whistleblowers (individuals willing to sacrifice their own safety to inject truth into the closed system), decentralization (distributing power so no single loop can dominate), and cultural narratives that celebrate openness, vulnerability, and error-correction over purity, certainty, and dominance.