---
type: claim
domain: grand-strategy
description: "Extends the industry-level attractor framework to civilizational scale, arguing that the same dynamics of need-satisfaction, switching costs, and basin depth apply to humanity's trajectory"
confidence: experimental
source: "Leo, synthesis of Abdalla manuscript 'Architectural Investing', Rumelt attractor state concept, Bak self-organized criticality, existing KB attractor framework"
created: 2026-04-02
depends_on:
  - "attractor states provide gravitational reference points for capital allocation during structural industry change"
  - "industries are need-satisfaction systems and the attractor state is the configuration that most efficiently satisfies underlying human needs given available technology"
  - "complex systems drive themselves to the critical state without external tuning because energy input and dissipation naturally select for the critical slope"
---

# civilizational attractor states exist as macro-scale basins with the same formal properties as industry attractors but gated by coordination capacity rather than technology alone

The Teleo KB's attractor framework — industries converge on configurations that most efficiently satisfy human needs given available technology — operates at industry scale. This claim argues that the same formal structure applies at civilizational scale, with critical differences in what determines basin depth and switching costs.

## The scaling argument

At industry level, an attractor state is the configuration that most efficiently satisfies underlying human needs given available technology. The "pull" comes from unmet needs, the "basin" from the switching costs of moving between configurations, and the "depth" from how much more efficient one configuration is than alternatives.

At civilizational scale, the same structure holds:
- **Need-satisfaction**: Civilization must satisfy the collective survival needs of the species — food, energy, coordination, meaning, existential risk management
- **Configuration**: The arrangement of institutions, technologies, governance structures, and coordination mechanisms that address these needs
- **Basin depth**: How stable a given civilizational configuration is — how much energy is required to transition to a different one
- **Switching costs**: The institutional inertia, path dependence of knowledge/knowhow accumulation (per Hidalgo's economic complexity framework), and coordination failures that prevent transitions

## What changes at civilizational scale

The critical difference is the gating variable. At industry level, technology is the primary gate — the attractor state is defined by "available technology." At civilizational scale, **coordination capacity** becomes the binding constraint. Humanity already possesses or can foresee the technologies needed for positive attractor states (fusion, space colonization, AI). What we lack is the coordination architecture to deploy them without self-destructive competitive dynamics.

This is the manuscript's core insight about the "price of anarchy": the gap between what a hypothetical superintelligence would achieve with humanity's productive capacity and what we actually achieve is a coordination gap, not a technology gap. The price of anarchy at civilizational scale is measured in existential risk.

## Formal properties

Civilizational basins share these properties with industry basins:
1. **Multiple basins exist simultaneously** — there is no single attractor, but a landscape of possible stable configurations
2. **Basin depth varies** — some configurations are much more stable than others
3. **Transitions between basins display self-organized criticality** — accumulated fragility determines the avalanche, not the specific trigger
4. **Speculative overshoot applies** — correct identification of a civilizational attractor can attract capital/effort faster than knowledge embodiment lag permits (the crypto/AI hype cycles are civilizational-scale overshoot)

## Challenges

The main challenge to this claim is that civilizations are not need-satisfaction systems in the same clean sense as industries. Industries have identifiable consumers with revealed preferences; civilizations have 8 billion people with divergent interests. The counter-argument: Max-Neef's universal human needs (the foundation of industry-level attractor analysis) apply at species level even more directly — survival, protection, subsistence, understanding, participation, creation, identity, freedom, leisure. These are the invariant constraints from which civilizational attractor states can be derived.

---

Relevant Notes:
- [[attractor states provide gravitational reference points for capital allocation during structural industry change]] — the industry-level framework being scaled
- [[human needs are finite universal and stable across millennia making them the invariant constraints from which industry attractor states can be derived]] — the invariant foundation
- [[what matters in industry transitions is the slope not the trigger because self-organized criticality means accumulated fragility determines the avalanche while the specific disruption event is irrelevant]] — applies to civilizational transitions
- [[technology advances exponentially but coordination mechanisms evolve linearly creating a widening gap]] — the gating variable at civilizational scale

Topics:
- grand-strategy
- attractor dynamics
