Persistence Is Not Action: Gravity and the Misattribution of Direction

Astrophysical systems often exhibit long-lived, coherent orientations—such as shared orbital direction or rotational handedness—that are frequently attributed to gravity as an organizing or enforcing agent. However, stable systems with opposing orientations coexist within identical gravitational fields, demonstrating that gravity does not encode or enforce directional preference. This paper argues that attributing directional persistence to gravity constitutes a category error arising from a conflation of structural inheritance with causal agency. We distinguish structural selection, which reduces degrees of freedom and produces preferred configurations during formation, from persistence, which reflects the absence of processes capable of erasing inherited structure. Gravity is shown to function as a binding constraint that preserves admissible motion without selecting orientation or enforcing order. Directional coherence is therefore the frozen consequence of upstream structural selection, not evidence of continuous gravitational action. Clarifying this distinction restores consistency across astrophysical systems and aligns gravitational interpretation with constraint-based treatments of stability elsewhere in physics.