From Blame to Belief: How Rationalization Turns Structural Negligence into Moral Comfort

This paper reframes safety failure not as a problem of individual misconduct, but as a structural process driven by maintenance economics, visibility bias, and rationalization dynamics. Within the IPCSALT–UPF framework, safety is defined as recoverability (RtR) — the capacity of a system to exit near-failure regimes and restore viable operation. When structural maintenance investment ($E_{\text{main}}$) declines, recovery pathways (BPR), interpretability windows (IW), and path diversity (D) erode long before visible accidents occur. After failure, unresolved pressure ($\Psi$) is discharged through blame (Paper 46). That directional blame is then stabilized through rationalization, forming Justification Scaffolds (JS) that transform structural neglect into morally defensible belief. As JS hardens, explanation replaces repair, procedural complexity increases, and systemic recoverability continues to decline. This paper formalizes rationalization as a form of cognitive maintenance: cheaper, more visible, and politically safer than structural reinvestment. Through the “rationalization ratchet,” safety standards normalize downward while justification complexity escalates upward, producing irreversible safety degradation without malicious intent. Safety failures are used as a case study to demonstrate how non-malicious, rational actors systematically generate Joint Alignment Memory (JAM) structures — locked-in patterns of explanation, habit, and institutional identity that make future recovery increasingly costly. The paper concludes by proposing a Root Decay Analysis (RDA) protocol, shifting investigations from individual culpability to structural erosion, and introducing a Pre-JAM Diagnostic Checklist to detect early-stage condensation before reversibility is lost. This work integrates Papers 45–49 of the IPCSALT–UPF research program and positions rationalization as the critical middle step between blame and hysteresis in systemic collapse dynamics.