Counterpoint: the conclusions of legal, compliance and security rest upon social fictions and power structures, but fundamentally at a certain scale, all things act like the original commenter said.

In my experience with the above, people get paged until a "socially plausible fiction or resolution" can be created.

There's several versions of these, one of which is to engage in enough rituals and processes so that we all pretend the task has been completed and the requisite outputs and points of reference exist. An archaeologist knows they don't and they can't and that we lay on bedrocks of speculation, history, ignorance and myth, but we don't have to worry too much about the fiction we create because we also know that disproving such mechanically is also extremely impossible/unlikely.

And we have a host of other social functions to get out of the cases where it could, such as:

- throwing people under the bus/human sacrifice/ finger pointing

- contrition

- plausible deniabilty

- continued non-compliance and non-enforcement

- bribery

- bullshit jobs