Cooperating Under Bad Faith

The lens that makes predation, capture, and exploitation legible inside cooperative systems — naming the intentional adversary who studies the system to exploit it and the structural adversary that rewards defection regardless of intent.

The discipline of distinguishing genuine dissent from strategic sabotage — five behavioral signatures read at the pattern scale, calibrated against the severe cost of false positives.

How the Bond's own practices — good faith, steelmanning, connection before correction, tolerance, repair — become attack surfaces when one party invokes them asymmetrically while exempting themselves from the constraint.

When a cooperative framework has to exclude a participant in order to survive — the four conditions that together justify exclusion, and the structural safeguards against exclusion becoming the failure mode the framework was built to refuse.

The two-phase pattern of building trust capital specifically in order to spend it on extraction — and the institutional-capture form when the pattern runs at scale through legitimate channels over time.