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Executive Summary
Civilizations across history repeatedly proclaim universal moral ideals — justice, compassion, human dignity — while simultaneously reproducing systemic violence, inequality, disease, and ecological degradation. This paper demonstrates that this contradiction is not primarily a failure of moral intention or religious sincerity. It is the predictable outcome of a specific civilizational control architecture in which trust is displaced by structurally maintained threat once surplus, scale, and institutional distance exceed the limits of shared vulnerability.
Using a unified Threat–Trust Phase Model, the paper shows how early human societies were regulated by trust under symmetric exposure to risk, while large-scale civilizations transition into threat-dominant regimes through surplus accumulation, risk displacement, and the emergence of asymmetric safety. Once threat becomes a continuous background condition rather than an episodic signal, it is biologically embodied as chronic stress, autonomic dysregulation, immune disturbance, and trans-generational trauma — driving the modern global burden of non-communicable disease.
The paper further demonstrates that modern economic doctrines of scarcity, unemployment, austerity, and inequality function as active threat-production mechanisms rather than neutral market phenomena. Modern Monetary Theory reveals that under monetary sovereignty, these threat conditions are not imposed by physical limits but by self-imposed policy rules that restrict currency issuance while allowing idle labor, unmet social need, and preventable disease to persist.
A life-focused political economy is then proposed, in which intrinsic health — rather than growth or asset valuation — becomes the primary macroeconomic target. Core trust infrastructures are identified in universal healthcare, shared-risk water and energy systems, a standing Job Guarantee, and education as a cross-generational security system. These are operationalized through an Intrinsic Health Impact Assessment (IHIA) framework that embeds biological, social, and ecological health directly into governance.
The final sections show that transition resistance is structurally rooted in elite insulation and institutional inertia, and that large-scale transition accelerates only when risk becomes non-exportable — through climate destabilization, health system saturation, and fiscal contradiction. The paper concludes that the central question of the twenty-first century is not whether humanity can rediscover virtue, but whether civilizations will continue to govern through manufactured threat or deliberately redesign their control systems around shared safety and intrinsic health.
