When the Triad Collapses
When the Triad Collapses
Triads don’t break suddenly.
They rot. One vertex grows. It absorbs resources from the others. The system looks intact. The structures remain. The names persist. But the balance that made the triad functional has been destroyed.
By the time the collapse is visible to everyone, it happened years or decades ago. What you’re seeing is not the fall. It’s the delayed recognition that the building has been empty for a long time.
This essay is about seeing the collapse while it’s happening. Before the visible fall. When intervention might still be possible.
The Pattern of Collapse
Every triadic collapse follows the same structural pattern:
Phase 1: Hypertrophy. One vertex begins to grow disproportionately. This often happens for good reasons. The growing vertex is successful. It works. It delivers results. So it gets more resources, more attention, more status.
Phase 2: Subordination. The other vertices begin to serve the dominant one. They don’t disappear. They get repurposed. They now exist to support the dominant vertex rather than to provide their own distinct function.
Phase 3: Hollowing. The subordinated vertices lose their substance while keeping their form. They still exist as categories, as departments, as ideas. But they no longer function independently. They are shells.
Phase 4: Brittle stability. The system continues to operate, but it has lost its resilience. It can handle normal conditions but cannot adapt to stress. The triad has become a monopole with vestigial attachments.
Phase 5: Sudden collapse. A stress arrives that the system cannot absorb. What looked stable falls apart rapidly. Everyone is surprised except those who were watching the structure, not the surface.
This pattern repeats at every scale. Personal relationships. Institutions. Civilizations.
The Warning Signs
You can diagnose Phase 2 and Phase 3 if you know what to look for.
The vocabulary shifts. Words that once named distinct functions start to blur. When people use terms interchangeably that should mean different things, the underlying distinctions are collapsing.
In a healthy justice system, “legal” and “just” are different words because they name different things. Something can be legal but unjust. When people stop making this distinction, the triad of law, justice, and equity is collapsing.
The metrics converge. In a healthy system, different vertices are measured by different standards. When all measurements collapse into one metric, the unmeasured vertices will atrophy.
When a university measures everything by enrollment and revenue, the triads of teaching, research, and service collapse into whatever generates enrollment and revenue. The others become performances without substance.
The personnel become interchangeable. In a healthy triad, different vertices require different kinds of people with different skills and orientations. When everyone starts to look the same, think the same, optimize for the same things, the distinct functions are collapsing.
When every position in an organization requires the same profile, the organization no longer has distinct functions. It has one function with different labels.
The criticism becomes unspeakable. In a healthy triad, each vertex can critique the others. When criticism of the dominant vertex becomes taboo, impossible, or career-ending, the system has lost its self-correction mechanism.
When you cannot question the priorities of the dominant vertex without being labeled as against the entire enterprise, the triad has collapsed into a monoculture.
Case Studies in Collapse
The university. Once a triad of teaching, research, and service to society. Each vertex had its champions, its metrics, its mode of excellence.
The collapse: research became dominant. Not research for its own sake, but research as measured by grants, publications, citations. Teaching became a burden that subsidized research time. Service became a checkbox.
The hollowing: teaching still happens, but it has been systematically deprioritized. Service still exists as a category, but almost no one is rewarded for it. What remains is the form without the function.
The result: institutions that call themselves universities but are actually research production facilities with attached credential mills.
The news media. Once a triad of information, investigation, and public accountability.
The collapse: attention became dominant. Not attention in service of information, but attention as measured by engagement, clicks, shares. Investigation became expensive and rarely rewarded. Public accountability became indistinguishable from public relations.
The hollowing: news still gets reported. But investigation has been defunded. Accountability has been captured. What remains optimizes for attention regardless of truth or impact.
The result: an information environment that generates more content than ever while informing less than ever.
The corporation. Once a triad of owners, workers, and customers. Each group had legitimate claims that had to be balanced.
The collapse: shareholder value became dominant. Not as one consideration among three, but as the sole purpose of the enterprise. Workers became costs to be minimized. Customers became extraction opportunities.
The hollowing: workers still exist, but as “human resources.” Customers still exist, but as “consumers” to be manipulated. The language itself reveals the subordination.
The result: organizations that generate enormous shareholder returns while hollowing out the workforce and eroding customer trust.
The Collapse in Relationships
The same pattern operates at the personal level.
The friendship. A triad of enjoyment, support, and honesty. Friends enjoy each other’s company, support each other through difficulty, and tell each other uncomfortable truths.
Collapse pattern 1: Enjoyment dominates. The friendship becomes fun but shallow. Support is absent when needed. Honesty is avoided because it might reduce enjoyment.
Collapse pattern 2: Support dominates. The friendship becomes a crisis management system. Every interaction is heavy. Enjoyment disappears. Honesty becomes “brutal truth” with no care for how it lands.
Collapse pattern 3: Honesty dominates. The friendship becomes a critique delivery service. Every interaction is an evaluation. Enjoyment is seen as frivolous. Support is withheld because “you need to hear the truth.”
Each collapse produces something that still looks like friendship but no longer functions as one.
The partnership. A triad of passion, commitment, and respect. Partners desire each other, commit to each other, and respect each other as separate individuals.
Collapse pattern: Commitment dominates. The partners stay together out of obligation. Passion fades and is not renewed. Respect erodes because the commitment has become a trap rather than a choice.
Or passion dominates. The partners chase intensity. Commitment becomes a constraint. Respect becomes impossible because the other person is just a source of stimulation.
Or respect dominates. The partners become colleagues. Passion seems inappropriate. Commitment becomes a business arrangement.
The Diagnostic Practice
When you suspect a triad is collapsing, ask these questions:
Which vertex is growing? What is getting more resources, more attention, more status? What does success look like in this system, and which vertex does success serve?
Which vertices are shrinking? What has been defunded, deprioritized, staffed with less talented people? What has become “nice to have” rather than essential?
What criticism is unspeakable? What question cannot be asked without being seen as attacking the whole system? What would get you expelled from the conversation?
What would a healthy version of this triad look like? If each vertex were genuinely functional and mutually regulating, what would be different?
The gap between the healthy version and the current version is the measure of collapse.
The Post-Collapse Landscape
After a triad collapses, something remains. But what remains is not a triad. It’s a monoculture with vestigial organs.
The institution still exists. It has the same name, the same buildings, the same formal structure. But it no longer performs the functions that justified its existence.
This is the zombie phase. The walking dead of institutions. They consume resources. They produce outputs. They maintain themselves. But the animating force that made them meaningful is gone.
You can recognize zombie institutions by a specific quality: they cannot explain why they exist in terms that would justify creating them today. They exist because they exist. Their purpose is their perpetuation.
A living institution can answer: “Why should we exist?” A zombie institution can only answer: “We have always existed.”
The Question of Repair
Can a collapsed triad be repaired?
Sometimes. But not by the forces that caused the collapse.
The dominant vertex cannot fix the problem because the dominant vertex is the problem. It will interpret any reform as an attack on itself. It will co-opt any change initiative to serve its own growth.
Repair requires external pressure or internal insurgency. Something that can restore the other vertices not as subordinates of the dominant one, but as genuinely distinct and mutually regulating functions.
This is rare. The usual outcome of triadic collapse is not repair but replacement. The collapsed system continues until it fails catastrophically, and then something new emerges from the wreckage.
This is not hopeful. But it is accurate.
The value of diagnosis is not that it enables easy repair. The value is that it enables you to see clearly. To not be surprised when the collapse becomes visible. To position yourself appropriately for what comes after.
And perhaps, in some cases, to be part of the insurgency that restores balance before the catastrophic end.
This is an essay in the Triads series—an anatomy of balance, collapse, and restoration in conduct, power, truth, authority, identity, the body, and civilization. Next: what restoration actually requires—protecting neglected vertices, accepting a new balance, and thinking in generations.