Omnicidal

The word for a system whose ordinary, intended, well-functioning operation ends life at scale — not one that fails catastrophically, but one whose success is the catastrophe.

The distinction it marks is the whole of it, and it is the distinction most arguments about harm miss. A dangerous system causes harm when it malfunctions, so the response is safety: better maintenance, better oversight, better people. An omnicidal one causes harm by working, so no amount of improvement helps and the response is different in kind — such a thing is not reformed, it is replaced (New Wine Requires New Wineskins, Hospicing the Old Systems, Systemic Failure Modes).

That is why it appears in this corpus at the point where a judgment is being made rather than a feeling expressed. If the arrangement's normal operation is what is ending things, then patience, reform and working-within are not moderate positions; they are a decision to let the normal operation continue (The Meta Crisis, The Asymmetry of Consequences, Withdrawal Of Consent).

The word reaches past humans, deliberately. What is at issue is not one species' survival but the wider living whole, most of which has no part in the arrangement and no way to leave it (Living System, Biodiversity, Inter-Kingdom Relationship, Reverence, Patterns of Death).

It is an extremely heavy word and should be held as one. Applied loosely it is a way of ending a conversation rather than making an argument, and a body that reaches for it often has stopped distinguishing between things that must be replaced and things it dislikes (Discernment, No False-Oppositional Framings, Proportionality, We Do Not Know).

So the test is the one the word itself proposes: does the harm follow from the thing malfunctioning, or from the thing working? Only the second earns the word (Root Causes, The Meta Dragon).

Used twice in its source and never defined.

Also called: ending life by operating normally Stands on: Patterns of Death · The Meta Crisis · Living System Opens onto: Hospicing the Old Systems · New Wine Requires New Wineskins · Systemic Failure Modes · Biodiversity · Trickle-Up Collapse · Evil · Proportionality · The Meta Dragon In play: beyond — the judgment made before a body decides whether to reform something or leave it Sources: LIØNSBERG Wiki Books/The Greatest Fraud, Deception, and Existential Threat in History (unmarked — used twice, undefined) Open: Undefined in its source, and the definition here is reconstruction. · No threshold is given, and without one the word does rhetorical work it has not earned.