Human societies are experiencing rising levels of physiological dysregulation, social fragmentation, institutional brittleness, and cultural polarization. Conventional responses have focused on cognitive, ideological, and policy-level interventions, but these efforts have struggled because they begin at the level of meaning rather than the level of biological regulation. Drawing on Marvin Harris’ cultural materialism and contemporary research in mitochondria-mediated stress physiology, autonomic regulation, interoception, and social neuroscience, this paper proposes that the foundational layer of culture is the regulatory state of the human body.
We introduce the concept of Coherence Infrastructure — the material, environmental, temporal, and relational scaffolding that supports stable autonomic regulation across a population. We show how this infrastructure shapes institutional structure and cultural superstructure through a cascading process linking metabolism, immune tone, emotional perception, social behavior, and collective meaning. We then outline a four-phase implementation framework: Regulate → Relate → Reorganize → Re-story, which enables the transition from defensive society to regenerative civilization. The resulting model reframes social transformation not as ideological persuasion, but as the design of conditions that restore physiological safety, relational trust, and cultural continuity.
