# Cooperating Under Bad Faith

Source: https\://meridiancodex.com/inheritance/cooperating-under-bad-faith

Author: Carsten Geiser

Work: The Meridian Codex; work version: 6.2

License: CC BY 4.0 — https\://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Operating cooperatively under intentional adversarial pressure — recognizing trust mining, weaponized good faith, and capture patterns, and knowing the conditions under which exclusion from a particular setting becomes necessary to protect the cooperative conditions there.

Normative

*Bond*

## The Work

Cooperative systems attract actors who study them in order to exploit them. The work of this category is to keep cooperation functioning under that pressure: recognizing when trust is being mined, when good faith is being weaponized, and when protective exclusion has become necessary. The hardest part is that the Bond's own practices become attack surfaces when one party operates in bad faith.

[Read the architecture →](https://meridiancodex.com/inheritance/cooperating-under-bad-faith/architecture)

## The Tools

**[Adversarial Dynamics](https://meridiancodex.com/inheritance/cooperating-under-bad-faith/adversarial-dynamics).** The lens that makes predation, capture, and exploitation legible inside cooperative systems — asking whether another party is strategically using cooperative norms while remaining unaccountable to them.

**[Trust Mining](https://meridiancodex.com/inheritance/cooperating-under-bad-faith/trust-mining).** Accumulating trust capital through demonstrated alignment, then redirecting the institution's resources once authority is sufficient.

**[The Cooperative Vulnerability](https://meridiancodex.com/inheritance/cooperating-under-bad-faith/cooperative-vulnerability).** How the Bond's own practices — good faith as default, the steelman requirement, connection before correction — become exploitable surfaces when one party is not practicing in good faith.

**[Sabotage Diagnostics](https://meridiancodex.com/inheritance/cooperating-under-bad-faith/sabotage-diagnostics).** Recognizing the deliberate degradation of a cooperative system from inside it, distinct from ordinary friction or honest disagreement.

**[The Exclusion Problem](https://meridiancodex.com/inheritance/cooperating-under-bad-faith/exclusion-problem).** The conditions under which exclusion from a particular cooperative setting becomes necessary to protect the conditions of practice there, and how to exclude without becoming the thing being excluded.

### Source metadata

```json
{
  "title": "Cooperating Under Bad Faith",
  "description": "Operating cooperatively under intentional adversarial pressure — recognizing trust mining, weaponized good faith, and capture patterns, and knowing the conditions under which exclusion from a particular setting becomes necessary to protect the cooperative conditions there.",
  "aiSummary": "Entry-point category page for Bond → Cooperating Under Bad Faith. Short framing of the category's work (keeping cooperation functioning when someone is strategically or asymmetrically exploiting it; recognizing trust mining, weaponized good faith, and the conditions for protective exclusion); contributing tools listed for navigation (Adversarial Dynamics as the lens; Trust Mining, The Cooperative Vulnerability, Sabotage Diagnostics, and The Exclusion Problem as the four mechanism profiles); quiet link to the Architecture page. The architectural reasoning — the adversarial threshold, the lens-mechanism framing, the tools-inside paragraph, and the chapter-relationship note — lives at /inheritance/cooperating-under-bad-faith/architecture.",
  "discipline": "bond",
  "category": "cooperating-under-bad-faith",
  "status": "working-draft-v0-1"
}
```