Individual Rationality, Collective Failure and Reflexive Closed-Loop: A Study on the Unified Mechanism across Politics, Enterprises and Markets

Mainstream economics, organizational management and historical sociology have long maintained disciplinary fragmentation in explaining system failure, reform deadlock and policy ineffectiveness. Economics emphasizes market-expectation reflexivity; management focuses on organizational rigidity in large corporations; historiography interprets interest-group lock-in at the late stage of dynasties. Existing studies mostly discuss these phenomena in separate domains and fail to extract a unified underlying logic applicable across scenarios. Building on existing research, this paper constructs a general reflexive closed-loop analytical framework of "crisis anticipation → individual self-preservation → collective amplification → crisis materialization" to integrate those scattered explanations. This study argues that a two-way feedback loop exists between reform objectives and practical dilemmas in the reform process. The core dividing line for reform success or failure lies in whether reform leaders possess sufficient bargaining chips to break this negative feedback loop. The underlying game mechanism of individual self-preservation remains constant; breaking the closed-loop does not mean eliminating individuals' self-preservation motives. The proposed framework attempts to uniformly explain cross-domain phenomena including the collapse of late-Ming-Dynasty reforms, the implementation of Yongzheng's New Policies, organizational inertia solidified by KPI systems in modern large-scale enterprises, and policy arbitrage offsetting regulatory effects in financial markets. It provides an integrated explanatory paradigm for understanding structural failures of various systems in modern society.