To understand civilisation, we must track three synergistic dynamics:
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Horizon: the range of distinctions a collective is ready to construe (its potential for meaning).
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Metabolism: the patterned activities by which a collective sustains itself (its potential for doing).
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Ecology: the distributed relational environment in which horizon and metabolism interact (its potential for coordinating).
Civilisation is the drift of these potentials as they fold into each other over generations.
1. Civilisation as Inherited Readiness
A civilisation is not defined by artefacts or institutions but by a collective readiness to construe certain possibilities as salient.
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Democracy becomes possible because a population is ready to distinguish persons as equal in a symbolic sense.
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Science becomes possible because a population is ready to distinguish phenomena as instances of generalisable systems.
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Markets become possible because a population is ready to distinguish value as transferable abstraction.
These are not structures; they are readiness formations, architectural dispositions baked into the symbolic metabolism of a culture.
When we say “civilisation declines,” what drifts is not infrastructure but the horizon of what the collective is ready to mean.
2. Horizon Drift: When the Possible Becomes Unreadable
Civilisations fail when their inherited horizon becomes misaligned with:
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the metabolic demands of their environment
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the ecological conditions that support coordination
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their own symbolic load (too much distinction, not enough readiness)
A civilisation collapses not because people forget facts, but because the collective can no longer construe what once held it together.
The myth of the “lost knowledge” civilisation is misleading: what is lost is the readiness to recognise knowledge as meaningful in the first place.
3. Metabolic Rigidity and the Cost of Symbolic Inertia
Civilisations must metabolise:
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energy
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attention
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symbolic distinctions
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social coordination
This produces the familiar pattern:
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Ritual remains after meaning dissipates
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Bureaucracy remains after trust dissolves
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Institutions remain after horizon contracts
Civilisations become self-replicating shells: metabolic activity without horizon.
This is not decay; it is displacement — readiness drifting away from inherited forms.
4. Symbolic Lineage as Care for Potential
The only thing a civilisation transmits is:
the readiness for future generations to construe meaningfully.
Civilisation is, at its heart, a care system for potential.
This reframes intergenerational responsibility:
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Not “preserving traditions”
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Not “passing down knowledge”
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But maintaining the horizon-metabolic alignment that keeps potential open
Care becomes the practice of keeping readiness fertile.
This is why civilisations that over-optimise for efficiency, stability, or certainty eventually suffocate themselves: they prioritise metabolic conservation over horizon evolution.
5. Symbolic Transport and Lineage Drift
Symbolic transport — the movement of distinctions across contexts — is where civilisations evolve or fracture.
Transport can drift in three ways:
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Horizon expands faster than metabolism→ symbolic saturation, loss of pragmatic footing, civilisational vertigo.
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Metabolism accelerates faster than horizon→ technocratic narrowing, symbolic malnutrition.
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Ecology reorganises without either adapting→ coordination breakdown, fragmentation into micro-lineages.
The contemporary global situation is arguably all three at once.
Civilisation is no longer a stable container; it is a turbulent relational ecology where horizon, metabolism, and symbolic transport are drifting out of resonance.
6. Civilisation’s Fragile Moment: A Relational Diagnosis
We can now ask: Where is the drift occurring today?
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Horizon is expanding uncontrollably through planetary-scale symbolic machinery (AI, networks, automating inference).
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Metabolism is accelerating into hyper-efficient, low-meaning routines.
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Ecology is fragmenting into incompatible vantage structures.
Humanity’s readiness is being redistributed faster than it can be integrated.
Civilisation is not “in crisis” — it is between cuts, suspended between a no-longer and a not-yet.
7. Care as Civilisation’s Primary Metabolism
At civilisational scale, the only viable metabolism is:
care for horizon.
Care becomes:
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the craft of sustaining readiness
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the practice of maintaining the fertility of possibility
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the vigilance that prevents horizon from drifting into incoherence
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the gentle steering that prevents metabolism from rigidifying
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the cultivation of ecological resonance across differences
Civilisation persists only where this care is enacted.
Without it, lineage collapses into symbolic exhaustion.
Closing Gesture: Civilisation as the Stewardship of Possibility
In this frame, civilisation is not:
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a stage of development
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a set of institutions
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a collective identity
Civilisation is the stewardship of readiness across generations.
It is the art of sustaining the horizon from which meaning can be actualised.
And the civilisation that survives the present drift will not be the one with the strongest infrastructure or the most advanced technologies.
It will be the one that learns to care for the possibility of meaning itself.
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