Identity as Refusal: A Coupling-Architectural Account of the Byzantine Case

Some populations refuse materially-beneficial accommodations at catastrophic cost, because accepting the accommodation would mean ceasing to exist as the population being offered the choice. This paper specifies a mechanism for that class of phenomena. Four conditions are identified as jointly necessary for the transition at which a refusal practice becomes constitutive of identity rather than expressive of commitment: duration across multiple generations; coupling concentration such that the refusal carries primary identity-work with no alternative carrier available; antagonistic differentiation with a defined Other whose accommodation is forbidden by the tradition’s internal logic; and material degradation without replacement. A class-disaggregated extension distinguishes how these conditions operate across strata, and how the couplings of elite and producing classes can point in opposite directions. The mechanism is developed through the Byzantine case from 1204 to 1453, culminating in the 1453 decision to accept Ottoman conquest rather than ecclesiastical union with Rome. The paper’s contribution is the coordination of Marvin Harris’s Cultural Materialism with the Trotskyist analysis of institutional structure — an operational coordination rather than a philosophical synthesis. This paper is part of the Coupling Geometry research programme. The framework's axiomatic foundation is presented in a companion paper: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20138144. The framework's civilisational empirical evidence base is presented in a second companion paper: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20137863. The general statement of the mechanism analysed here — the structural conditions under which a population sacrifices survival to preserve identity, of which the Byzantine case is one instance — is developed in a third companion paper: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20581448.