Cancer as a Semantic Feedback Error: From Cellular Collapse to Cultural Pathology

This interdisciplinary paper reframes cancer not merely as a biological anomaly, but as a semantic feedback error—a system’s inability to interpret internal deviation. Building on this metaphor, the work extends the cancer model into the cultural domain, asking: What happens when a society treats cultural difference the same way a body treats cancer? Through this lens, the paper argues that modern civilizations exhibit cultural autoimmune responses: attacking minority identities, dissent, and ideological variation under the logic of “purity,” “stability,” or “unity.” These behaviors mirror biological cancer responses not in mutation itself, but in the systemic failure to buffer and interpret semantic variation. The paper introduces the concept of semantic load as a threshold of interpretive capacity, distinguishing between: Cultural assimilation: which seeks control through erasure Semantic symbiosis: which supports adaptive coherence through negotiated meaning Drawing from biology, systems theory, and cultural philosophy, this work proposes a new model of semantic fault tolerance as the key to long-term civilizational resilience. Rather than eliminating cultural deviation, it calls for infrastructures that metabolize difference without collapse.