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Are we killing ourselves as a civilization — without knowing it?
This white paper answers yes. Not as metaphor, but as systemic diagnosis. We argue that the dominant trajectory of industrial civilization amounts to a collective assisted suicide, perpetuated by systems that reward fragmentation, suppress feedback, commodify meaning, and sever humans from the ecological and symbolic matrix of life.
Through eight interlocking sections, we explore how this suicide path expresses itself through:
- ecological overshoot,
- institutional paralysis,
- symbolic collapse,
- physiological degeneration,
- technological acceleration,
- structural complicity,
- moral abdication,
- and widespread epistemic confusion.
Yet, we do not end in despair. We locate clear signs of regeneration already underway — in regenerative agriculture, coherence-based medicine, bioregional governance, symbolic renewal, and youth-led cultural transformation.
At the heart of this reversal lies the TATi Spiral — a recursive symbolic grammar that guides coherent development through four phases: Tend, Align, Transcend, Integrate. This grammar serves as both a pattern recognition tool and a planetary design template, capable of reweaving coherence across bodies, communities, institutions, and worldviews.
We conclude with appendices detailing:
- A comparative table of the Suicide Spiral vs. Regenerative Spiral
- A catalog of emergent regenerative signals
- A glossary of coherence-centered terminology
- Policy reorientation frameworks across key domains
- A full symbolic recursion model based on the TATi grammar
A final Visual Synthesis Mandala illustrates the full symbolic logic of collapse and regeneration across eight civilizational dimensions.
This is not the end. It is the crossing.
The suicide path can still be reversed — if we recognize it, refuse it, and reconstitute our systems, symbols, and selves through coherence.
