This paper proposes that the modern world’s moral disintegration — characterized by widespread violence, systemic oppression, ecological collapse, and social fragmentation — can be traced to a civilizational disruption of developmental and relational coherence. Drawing on Darcia Narvaez’s evolved nest theory, this paper integrates a symbolic grammar of coherence (TATi: Tend, Align, Transcend, Integrate), the principle of symbolic recursion, and John McMurtry’s life-value onto-axiology to present a developmental, symbolic, and ontological account of how evil is produced, perpetuated, and potentially healed.
Rather than understanding evil as malevolence, we reframe it as systemic misalignment from the nested life conditions required for the emergence of the full moral self. Through disrupted early care, obedience-based institutions, ideological scripting, and symbolic compression, modern societies systematically produce what we term partial selves — individuals dissociated from their own moral compass, relational intelligence, and planetary embeddedness.
The antidote lies not in moral authoritarianism, but in the restoration of symbolic, relational, and developmental coherence across scales. We show how re-indigenizing the self and society through evolved nesting, symbolic recursion, and life-aligned moral metrics can restore moral agency, regenerate communal life, and reweave human participation in the greater ecology of becoming. In doing so, this paper offers a framework for moral regeneration grounded not in external authority, but in the living grammar of coherence itself.
