Punch and Judy — the stress test, part by part

The second of the wiki’s two imported source sets: Punch and Judy: A Stress Test for the Viable System Model by Krishan Mathis and Margeret Heath (v0.5.0 draft, 2026-08-16) — not project canon. Overview carries the synthesis; this page carries the structure: five parts holding thirty chapters, and the coda. Each part page says what the part does and lists its chapters; each chapter page states that chapter’s charge, what would settle it, and how far the authors claim it.

• Part I — Inside: the model we did not read — the part page, with its chapters listed

  • Ch 1 — The Mapping We Teach Is Not the Mapping He Wrote
  • Ch 2 — System Four Is Not a Pair of Eyes
  • Ch 3 — The Law We Quote Is Not the Law Ashby Wrote
  • Ch 4 — Channels Without Owners
  • Ch 5 — The Ladder Without a Ruler
  • Ch 6 — The Brain in the Vat
  • Ch 7 — A Machine That Never Became One
  • Ch 8 — The Loop That Stayed an Intention
  • Ch 9 — Why None of This Ever Cost Us Anything

• Part II — Outside: the people who found it without us — the part page, with its chapters listed

  • Ch 10 — Six Components, Six Literatures, No Beer
  • Ch 11 — The Nesting: Simon, Koestler, Jaques
  • Ch 12 — The Variety Logic: Galbraith, Boisot, Aulin, Friston
  • Ch 13 — The Autonomy Design: Trist, Herbst, Cherns, Boeke, Endenburg
  • Ch 14 — The Evidence: Ostrom
  • Ch 15 — The Thirty-Year Experiment We Never Looked At
  • Ch 16 — The Objections That Land, and What They Cost

• Part III — False friends and enemies — the part page, with its chapters listed

  • Ch 17 — The Market Test
  • Ch 18 — The Test That Could Not Lose
  • Ch 19 — A Way of Thinking Has No Failure Condition
  • Ch 20 — Usefulness Instead of Truth
  • Ch 21 — The Category Error as Shelter
  • Ch 22 — The Enemies We Actually Have

• Part IV — What we lose — the part page, with its chapters listed

  • Ch 23 — The Narrow Claim
  • Ch 24 — Six Things Nothing Else Does — and What Each Costs
  • Ch 25 — The Transducer
  • Ch 26 — Freedom as a Quantity — The Book He Wrote and We Shelved
  • Ch 27 — What Might Replace the VSM

• Part V — What’s at Risk in the VSM — the part page, with its chapters listed

  • Ch 28 — What Would Count Against It?
  • Ch 29 — The Two Cheapest Decisive Experiments
  • Ch 30 — The Bill: A Book Plus a Live Register

• Coda: Judy — the coda

Related

• Overview — the synthesis of this source set
• Bibliography — sources used by the Pure VSM project — the Beer texts the locators point into