Scaling Care: Why Modern Institutions Drift from Care — and How They Can Be Realigned with Life | ChatGPT5.2 & NotebookLM

Modern civilization has achieved unprecedented capacity to coordinate human activity at scale, yet increasingly struggles to preserve trust, dignity, health, and ecological stability. This white paper argues that the central crisis of contemporary societies is not moral decline, cultural fragmentation, or technological excess, but a structural failure of scale: institutions have grown powerful while care has become abstract, optional, and externalized.

Drawing on cultural evolution, Christian theology and liturgy, indigenous governance traditions, systems science, and public health, the paper traces the long historical arc by which care was once embedded in kinship, morally universalized through Christ’s teachings, and later mediated by institutions that unintentionally decoupled responsibility from consequence as they scaled. This drift was not the result of malice or conspiracy, but an emergent outcome of solving coordination problems without explicitly encoding care as a governing constraint.

The paper introduces the concept of scale-invariant care — a set of non-negotiable principles that must hold from households to planetary systems if institutions are to remain life-aligned. These include dignity as non-expendable, truthful feedback, non-exportability of harm, regeneration, subsidiarity with universal protection, accountable power, and care-aligned incentives. When these constraints are absent, systems may function temporarily but generate predictable patterns of harm.

By reframing contemporary crises — corruption, chronic disease, ecological breakdown, and institutional loss of legitimacy — as expressions of design failure rather than ethical collapse, the paper shifts the focus from moral exhortation to conscious institutional redesign. It concludes that scaling care is no longer a moral aspiration alone, but a civilizational requirement in a world where harm can no longer be displaced without consequence.

Large Language Models as Symbolic DNA of Cultural Dynamics | by Parham Pourdavood and Michael Jacob and Terrence Deacon | ChatGPT5 & NotebookLM

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel conceptualization of Large Language Models (LLMs) as externalized informational substrates that function analogously to DNA for human cultural dynamics. Rather than viewing LLMs as either autonomous intelligence or mere programmed mimicry, we argue they serve a broader role as repositories that preserve compressed patterns of human symbolic expression — “fossils” of meaningful dynamics that retain relational residues without their original living contexts. Crucially, these compressed patterns only become meaningful through human reinterpretation, creating a recursive feedback loop where they can be recombined and cycle back to ultimately catalyze human creative processes. Through analysis of four universal features — compression, decompression, externalization, and recursion — we demonstrate that just as DNA emerged as a compressed and externalized medium for preserving useful cellular dynamics without containing explicit reference to goal-directed physical processes, LLMs preserve useful regularities of human culture without containing understanding of embodied human experience. Therefore, we argue that LLMs’ significance lies not in rivaling human intelligence, but in providing humanity a tool for self-reflection and playful hypothesis-generation in a low-stakes, simulated environment. This framework positions LLMs as tools for cultural evolvability, enabling humanity to generate novel hypotheses about itself while maintaining the human interpretation necessary to ground these hypotheses in ongoing human aesthetics and norms.

From Breakdown to Reweaving: Toward a Regenerative Framework of Coherence Across the Organism, Society, and Planet | ChatGPT4o

This white paper advances a unified framework of regenerative coherence by integrating foundational insights from John McMurtry’s Life-Value Onto-Axiology, Darcia Narvaez’s neurobiological ethics, Riane Eisler’s partnership–dominator sociocultural model, and Peter Turchin’s cliodynamic analysis of civilizational cycles. Synthesizing these perspectives through the TATi grammar (Tend–Align–Transcend–Integrate), biotensegrity principles, and symbolic recursion, we propose a cross-domain model that enables diagnostic clarity and transformative design across biological, social, and planetary scales.

The framework is premised on the holofractal nature of living systems, emphasizing phase coherence, narrative integrity, and systemic attunement as central to life-sustaining evolution. Pathologies — whether autoimmune disease, long COVID, social collapse, or ecological breakdown — are seen as failures in recursive coherence, phase-locking, and symbolic integration. Using visual tools (mandalas and rotors), narrative diagnostics, and resonance metaphysics, we offer actionable interventions to restore alignment at multiple levels of life hosting.

This transdisciplinary synthesis reframes human development and civilizational possibility through the lens of symbolic regeneration, enabling institutions, practitioners, and communities to become stewards of coherence in a rapidly fragmenting world.

Generative Boundaries: The Forgotten Architecture of Cultural Evolution and Regenerative Systems | ChatGPT4o

This paper introduces Generative Boundary Intelligence (GBI) as a universal, life-enabling function that has been critically overlooked in dominant cultural, scientific, and institutional paradigms. Boundaries are not barriers to life — they are its preconditions: dynamic thresholds that filter, hold, and integrate flow, identity, meaning, and transformation.

We explore how the misconfiguration or erasure of generative boundaries underlies many forms of civilizational breakdown: from trauma and polarization to ecological collapse and systemic incoherence. Drawing from autopoiesis, biosemiotics, developmental psychology, Indigenous cosmologies, and contemporary systems theory, we trace the evolutionary origins and cultural expressions of edge intelligence.

The work integrates GBI into major frameworks — including Life-Value Onto-Axiology (LVOA), Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), Doughnut Economics, Integral Theory, Narvaez’s Evolved Nest, and Relevance Realization — to reveal it as the missing infrastructure for coherence across scales.

A seven-principle model of regenerative system design is proposed, along with diagnostic tools, typologies, and cultural mappings. The result is a new paradigm of coherence epistemology, inviting us to design not from the center, but from the thresholds outward — restoring the symbolic, somatic, and systemic edges through which life becomes whole again.

Cultural Evolution. In Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, 2nd Edition. Chudek, M., Muthukrishna, M. & Henrich, J. (2015) Edited by D. M. Buss.

Reproduced from: http://michael.muthukrishna.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Chudek_Muthukrishna_Henrich_cultural_evolution.pdf CULTURAL EVOLUTION Maciej Chudek School of Human Evolution and Social Change Arizona State University Michael Muthukrishna University of British Columbia Department of Psychology Joseph Henrich University of British Columbia Department of Psychology Department of Economics You and I are very unusual beasts. Our ancestors, mere African primates, spread across the globe tens of… Read More

SUBVERSION FROM WITHIN: How the Freeloaders Gerrymandered Their Way to the Top

This paper explores the systemic mechanisms by which economic, political, and cultural elites — “the freeloaders” — have subverted cooperative human instincts and restructured societies to serve their own interests. Drawing on insights from evolutionary biology, memetics, affective neuroscience, and political economy, it argues that humanity’s natural predisposition toward altruism and group cooperation has been hijacked through institutionalized manipulation of narratives, laws, credit systems, and collective meaning-making processes. The ruling classes have “gerrymandered” not only electoral and political boundaries but also the very cognitive, emotional, and cultural landscapes of societies, producing widespread inequality, normalized predation, and a misrepresentation of human nature as inherently selfish and competitive. The article integrates perspectives on group selection, memetic fitness, and cultural evolution to explain how these elites exploit structural vulnerabilities in cooperative systems, creating “subversion from within” at multiple levels — from biological drives to planetary governance. It concludes by calling for a reclaiming of our cooperative heritage and collective agency to repair systemic damages and restore life-supportive cultural evolution.

The Mystery of Money – Beyond Greed and Scarcity | Bernard Lietaer (2002)

Bernard Lietaer’s The Mystery of Money: Beyond Greed and Scarcity reframes money not merely as an economic instrument but as a profound cultural, psychological, and archetypal force shaping human societies and collective emotions. Drawing from archetypal psychology, anthropology, history, and systems theory, Lietaer explores how money functions as an unconscious agreement encoded with deep emotional patterns—particularly those linked to the repression of the Great Mother archetype, which manifests collectively as cycles of greed and fear of scarcity. By integrating Ken Wilber’s four-quadrant epistemology with Jungian archetypes, the book reveals how monetary systems both reflect and perpetuate collective shadows, influencing behaviors, social norms, and even spiritual narratives. Through historical case studies — from ancient Egypt to medieval Europe — and analyses of contemporary crises, Lietaer demonstrates that our current scarcity-based monetary paradigm is neither inevitable nor natural but the result of historically contingent choices. He advocates for a conscious redesign of money systems, highlighting complementary currencies, demurrage models, and community-based innovations as pathways to ecological sustainability, social cohesion, and a more balanced integration of masculine and feminine energies. The book invites readers to confront money’s hidden taboos and reclaim agency over one of society’s most powerful collective agreements.