Ordinance on Self-Fulfilling Directives

Ordinance on Self-Fulfilling Directives is the collective designation for a sequence of cataloguing instruments ratified between TY 6988 and TY 7042, concerned with directives whose issuance ensures the condition they describe. The Ordinance sits within the jurisdiction of the Department of Circular Logics, as affirmed by Concordance 55-B, and is frequently cited in disputes arising under Survey Directive 9.12.7 where an expedition's record is alleged to have created the floor it surveyed.

Origins and Ratification

The first recension of the Ordinance was drafted in the scriptorium of Floor 2809 the Radiant Stacks following a memorandum from the Clerk of Irreconcilable Directives, who observed that three consecutive winters of directive-amendment had produced orders that could only be obeyed by having already been obeyed. The Crisis of the Twin Directives had, by then, made the problem acute; the Third Concordance had established the self-evident necessity of Class A directives for Tower function, yet no instrument governed those directives that brought themselves into being upon inscription. The initial text was ratified as Ordinance 712-B in the aftermath of the Crisis of the Twin Directives, and later appended by Ordinance Gamma-7 when the Cataloguing Directives for Ephemera required containment of similarly recursive materials.

Principal Provisions

The Ordinance requires that any directive determined to be self-fulfilling be logged with the Desk of Contradictory Directives within one complete ascent of its promulgation. The Chancery of Directives holds the seals, and the Ordinance of Cessation 73-C formally suspended all such logging for seven cycles before being rescinded by the Permanent Directives review of TY 7011. A directive falling under the Ordinance is not considered invalid; rather, it is considered already satisfied, and its parchment is stored in the annexe reserved for the Self-Motile Fixture, which has on two recorded occasions relocated the relevant shelves without notice.

"A directive that names its own obedience is not a command but a weather report, and shall be archived as such."

— Ordinance on Self-Fulfilling Directives, Clause 4, Recension II

The Ordinance of Mediated States (TY 7011) later clarified that mediated states induced by such directives do not exempt a floor from the Supplemental Cartographic Directives, a position the Concordance 12, Section Δ partially contradicts in its Annex on closed loops.

Administrative Disputes

The Department of Circular Logics and the Desk of Contradictory Directives have maintained a dispute since TY 6997 over whether a self-fulfilling directive may be revoked by a later directive that fulfils its own revocation. The Clerk of Irreconcilable Directives ruled in TY 7003 that such revocation is valid only if the revoking ordinance is itself catalogued under the Lapsed Directives, a determination the Third Concordance does not address and Concordance 55-B implicitly precludes. The Phoneme Substitution Directives were briefly invoked to rename the contradiction out of existence, but the Draft Provisions committee rejected this as "an erosion of the record rather than a resolution of it."

Scholarly Disagreement

A long-standing disagreement concerns the relationship between the Ordinance and Ordinance 707, which governs paradoxically self-referential texts. The Concordance 12, Section Δ holds that the two instruments are co-extensive; Concordance 55-B, conversely, reserves self-referential texts to the Department and excludes them from the Ordinance's scope. The Ordinance 747-B raised Ontological Objections on the ground that the Ordinance's subject lacked verifiable existence, a complaint dismissed by the Clerk of Irreconcilable Directives as "a complaint about the rain." The Ordinance on Ephemeral Inks further complicated the matter by permitting such directives to fade before fulfilment, a practice the Permanent Directives tolerate only on floors lacking a numbered stairwell.

Notable Incidents

In TY 7019, a directive issued under the Ordinance on Floor 2809 the Radiant Stacks declared that "the east spiral shall be swept," and was found already swept at the moment of sealing; the Self-Motile Fixture was subsequently discovered in possession of the broom. The Ordinance 712-C later codified the broom's custody. During the suspension imposed by the Ordinance of Cessation 73-C, a visiting clerk from the lower scriptoria was prohibited from carrying more than one sealed directive at a time, as the combined weight was held to induce fulfilment in transit.