Strata slipping

Three named falls and each has a different cause, which is what makes the term diagnostic rather than merely descriptive. Falling from obedient reflector to negative image is the ordinary case and happens when the guilt a reflector was avoiding is assigned to them anyway. Falling from endo-ideal to reflector happens through sublation to a transcendental endogroup, meaning the figure at the centre of a smaller group is absorbed into a larger one and becomes a reflector of its endo-ideal instead, which is what happens to a family head under a state or a company founder under an acquirer. Falling from endo-ideal to negative image happens through revolution, which is the revolutionary event where an endo-ideal becomes the negative image for a portion of their former reflectors. So the three causes are guilt assignment, absorption and reversal. What the term supplies is a way of describing movement within a structure that otherwise gets described as changing fortunes. Nothing about the person changes in any of the three cases, and what changes is which quantities they receive, since the roles are defined by where virtue, ownership, victimhood, credit, vice, guilt and punishment accumulate. Marsh's account of what people do when it happens is relevant. Crises of endo-ideal or endogroup loss lead to regression to the last real or imagined circle of self, which is the law of the last circle operating at the level of an individual.

Sociology of stratification studies mobility as movement between classes measured by income, occupation and education, and status loss research documents the psychological effects of downward mobility. Goffman wrote on cooling the mark out, the management of people who have lost a position. Elite theory studies circulation between elite and non-elite. Marsh's version differs by making the strata roles rather than levels, so what a person slips between is defined by which quantities they receive rather than by what they possess, which is why her three cases have three distinct mechanisms rather than being degrees of one decline.