The Resilience Paradox Exogenous Resilience Imposition on Individuals and the Formation of Systemic Fragility

Abstract

The discourse on resilience has proliferated across disciplines—from psychology and organizational behavior to public policy and urban planning—often framing resilience as an unequivocal virtue. Yet this paper advances a counterintuitive proposition: when resilience is imposed upon individuals as a normative expectation or institutional mandate, it paradoxically generates fragility at the systemic level. Drawing on complexity theory, critical psychology, and neo-institutional theory, we theorize the Resilience Paradox as a multi-level mechanism in which the individualization of adaptive burden suppresses collective signal-transmission, erodes structural feedback loops, and displaces accountability from institutions to persons. We distinguish this contribution from prior critical resilience scholarship—specifically MacKinnon and Derickson's (2013) resourcefulness critique and Chandler's (2014) post-liberal governance framework—by providing: (a) a six-criterion operationalization framework for empirically identifying imposed versus endogenous resilience; (b) an explicit four-pathway causal model with specified pathway interactions and feedback dynamics; and (c) a Structural Accountability Reorientation (SAR) framework with sequenced implementation logic and explicit attention to institutional constraints. We conclude that resilience, when weaponized as an ideological imperative, functions as systemic risk displacement—masking macro-level vulnerabilities beneath a veneer of micro-level coping—and that addressing this paradox requires institutional redesign, not further individual adaptive burden.