Summary of Part IV

This part has developed a geometric theory of social relationships:

1. Relationship types as manifolds: Different relationship types define distinct viability manifolds with distinct gradients, information regimes, reciprocity structures, and exit conditions.
2. Incentive contamination: When two relationship-type manifolds coexist in a single relationship and their gradients conflict, the result is a distinctive phenomenological disturbance—what humans detect as "being used."
3. The ordering principle: Broader manifolds (requiring participant flourishing) can safely contain narrower ones, but not vice versa. This generates predictions about relationship formation sequences and institutional design.
4. Universal solvents: Money and sexual access dissolve manifold boundaries. Contamination is easier than decontamination. Forgiveness is work against this gradient.
5. Manifold technologies: Play, nature, and ritual maintain manifold separation. Their erosion produces contamination.
6. The civilizational inversion: When the transaction manifold swallows the care manifold—when narrow metrics dominate broad values—the result is structural pathology at civilizational scale.
7. Digital manifold novelty: Online relationships occupy regions of social space with no evolutionary precedent, producing characteristic unresolvable ambiguity.

These claims generate specific, testable predictions. The work ahead is to test them. What follows in Part V is the analysis of what happens when social-scale agentic patterns—superorganisms, gods—impose their own manifold regimes on human relationships.