Modern civilization is increasingly marked by paradox: systems designed to heal, educate, nourish, and protect are systematically producing illness, ignorance, fragmentation, and collapse. This paper examines the structural and symbolic mechanisms behind this inversion, showing how even ethical individuals are transformed into unwitting agents of incoherence when reward systems, institutional designs, and epistemologies are misaligned with life.
By tracing the anatomy of systemic inversion — through reward structures, symbolic misalignment, and epistemic suppression — we expose a recurring meta-pattern wherein coherence is actively penalized and incoherence becomes adaptive. Drawing on examples such as PFAS, glyphosate, institutionalized medicine, and education, the paper reveals how the collapse of coherence is both a material and metaphysical crisis.
The analysis culminates in a call to restore coherence as a civilizational telos, proposing regenerative attractors as fields of design, relation, and meaning that re-align pattern, perception, and purpose. Only by reweaving coherence across physiological, symbolic, institutional, and ecological domains can we enable systems to heal, truth to return, and civilization to remember how to see.
