Functional completeness replaces the too-narrow goal of maximize ecological capacity while preserving standing. A single supreme variable eventually sacrifices everything else to itself, so health has to be defined structurally instead: an ecology is alive only when the whole family of functions it depends on remains available, differentiated, mutually corrective, coordinated, and responsive. A system can look perfectly healthy while one strong function quietly substitutes for one it is missing — which is how an advanced society hollows out unnoticed.
Every function turns destructive when absolute
The reason all of them must be held together is that each, allowed to become the whole, becomes dangerous: emergence unchecked destroys; renewability becomes hoarding; signal access becomes surveillance; interiority becomes isolation; legitimacy becomes gatekeeping; participation becomes coercion; traversability can smooth the path for oppression; connection becomes endless expansion; fidelity can dissolve forms that still protect life. Integration is therefore not adding functions up but preserving each without letting it consume the others — the constitutional problem the whole project circles. See Is the Whole Thing Alive?.