Recovery Is a Policy

Recovery is not repair. Recovery is permission to continue after failure.

When a system recovers, it decides whether authority is restored, modified, or revoked.

That is policy.

I. The Dangerous Myth of “Automatic Recovery”

Recovery is often described as:

self-healing

resilience

restart logic

failover

This language hides governance.

Recovery decides:

which failures are forgiven

which consequences persist

whether state is trusted again

whether action may resume

Forgiveness without rule is arbitrary power.

II. Recovery Determines Moral Hazard

If recovery is unconditional:

actors can abuse the system

limits can be ignored

failure becomes cheap

If recovery is too strict:

legitimate actors are punished

progress halts

resilience collapses

Recovery balances consequence.

Balance is policy.

III. Recovery Is Not Reversal

Recovery does not mean:

undoing history

erasing failure

pretending damage never occurred

A lawful recovery:

preserves failure records

restores operation with context

applies consequences forward

Erasing failure is falsifying history.

IV. Recovery Must Be Explicitly Declared

A lawful recovery policy declares:

which failures are recoverable

required conditions (time, approval, proof)

which authority is restored

which authority remains revoked

Implicit recovery is undeclared amnesty.

V. Recovery Can Change the Law

After recovery:

permissions may be reduced

limits may be tightened

supervision may increase

modes may change

Recovery may introduce a stricter legal regime.

This is legitimate— if declared.

VI. Recovery Must Be Auditable

A lawful system records:

the failure

the recovery attempt

the decision

the resulting state

Who recovered, when, why, and under which policy.

Recovery without record is unaccountable resurrection.

VII. Replay Requires Recovery Semantics

Replay must reproduce:

the same failure

the same recovery attempt

the same decision

the same post-recovery state

If replay always “heals,” audit fails.

VIII. Infrastructure Recovery Is Not Law

Restarts, leader election, replica promotion do not define recovery policy.

They execute it.

Recovery law must live in:

kernel decisions

registry policy

versioned rules

Not in orchestration defaults.

IX. Final Conclusion

Recovery is a policy.

A lawful system:

treats recovery as restoration of authority

declares recoverable vs non-recoverable failures

preserves failure history

applies recovery consequences explicitly

replays recovery deterministically

Anything else allows systems to escape consequence by restarting.