Systems collapse when individuals stop mistaking rules for reality.

Rules are not reality; they are temporary models that work until they do not. When individuals stop protecting obsolete rules, systems are forced to choose between reinvention and irrelevance.

Every serious system—legal, financial, technical, political—rests on simplifications. Procedures, KPIs, and policies exist because no organisation can process full complexity. The problem starts when simplifications are rebranded as truths. Careers, identities, and status hierarchies grow around these abstractions, and questioning them begins to look irrational or disloyal. From that point on, the system will trade accuracy for self-preservation, even if it means quietly undermining the very reality it was created to manage—and eventually, that bill always comes due.