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Choose moves that expand both sides.
Emergentism adopts a cooperative gate: prefer moves where you and the system that sustains you preserve or raise one another. This is a declared ethic, not a theorem. Its supporting hypothesis is conditional: persistent extraction can erode the shared systems on which it depends.
The discovery
One rule, two directions at once.
Most moral systems hand you a list. This one hands you a gate. Before any move — a trade, a promise, a line of code, a business model — ask one question in both directions: after this move, are you better off, and is the whole you belong to better off? Not "on average," not "eventually, trust us." Both sides, this move, with the burden of proof on the mover.
Four outcomes are possible, and the chosen gate prefers one: you rise and the relevant whole rises. Both falling is failure. Self-sacrifice may sometimes be freely chosen, but it cannot sustain every system indefinitely. Rising by making the relevant whole fall is extraction. Emergentism chooses to refuse that move where the affected whole, time horizon, dependencies, and receipts can be named.
Why aim at zero extraction rather than merely less? Because some extraction compounds: it can degrade the trust, ecology, counterparty, or institution on which later moves depend. The structural claim is conditional — it holds where players remain dependent on a sufficiently closed shared system for long enough that degradation returns as consequence. Open systems, substitutes, regeneration, and short horizons are serious rival conditions, not footnotes.
Notice what the rule does not demand. It does not demand altruism, purity, or agreement about the good. It demands only that you not be the move that eats the board. Everything above that floor — generosity, sacrifice, ambition — stays yours to play.
Not "be good." Just this: never grow by draining what sustains you.
Why this matters to you
It gives you a one-question first audit for a job offer, pricing model, relationship, or algorithm: who gains capacity, who loses it, over what horizon, and according to whose receipt? It does not settle every moral conflict, but it exposes hidden transfers quickly enough to improve the next decision.
One last image, held as image only: in the chart's geometry the board's emblem is a family of tori that closes toward a sphere — a limit approached, never occupied. The arrival is an emblem [I], not a derivation — the crossing.
Held against adversarial audit — see the trial record.
[I] the cooperative gate — chosen, not derived · [C] extraction self-terminates under stated closure and dependency conditions