An Introduction to Civilisational Mechanics

by Max Ramsahoye

'The Great Lion' The City of London from the film Mortal Engines (concept art by Nick Keller)

Like the natural philosophers and classical physicists that sought to grasp the celestial mechanics of the universe, as a technological philosopher1 and social physicist2 of the modern world, the end of my inquiry is a civilisational mechanics: a grand critical systems theory3 of how civilisation functions and, more importantly, dysfunctions. 

In this regard, the principal aim of civilisational mechanics is to arrive at a theory of causation of contemporary problems, a theory of the metacrisis and the megamachine: how all the problems, crises and risks of modernity emerge from the fundamental structure and culture of civilisation, the dominant game-theories of the world-system and the underlying justifying beliefs that reproduce and enact4 them. 

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What we must end most fundamentally, 5 as the generator of the metacrisis, is the civilisational evolutionary process of military-economic adaptationism: a process that has previously game-theoretically forced 6 (Molochian- trapped) agriculturalisation (12,000 BCE) and industrialisation (1750) and is now accelerating autonomisation (2030): 7 the replacement of humans with AI agents in critical societal systems, resulting in either human disempowerment if successful or a misalignment catastrophe in the attempt.

Structurally, the world-system that must be exited is the semi-anarchic default condition: a multi-agent system with destabilising, competitive emergent dynamics (Moloch) that are not sufficiently regulated by a centralised controller (a 'singleton' or Leviathan) or decentralised control mechanisms (Autopoethia).

Culturally, 8 the belief-system that is conducive to competition and conflict and must be changed is one constituted by (the social construction of artificial) material scarcity ('mankind's economic problem'), cultural antagonism (mutually exclusive expansionist, universalist worldviews, 'clash of civilisations') and ontological separation (self-other dissonance, tribal identities, 'imagined communities'). [Keynes, Huntington, Anderson]

Ultimatelly, the self-terminating process we must counter-act is the new form of AI-exterminism (alt neo-exterminism): proceeding the nuclear exterminism of the Cold War, AI-exterminism in the 21st century is the emergent trajectory of the AI arms race towards mutually-assured AI malfunction and destruction ('"something that no one willed"; 'the resultant of competing configurations of social forces'). [Thompson]

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In light of this diagnosis, the project that must be undertaken is defined by pragmatic utopianism and civilisation design: the interdisciplinary research project of formulating the principles and protocols of an aligned world-system and the theory of transition (macrostrategy) towards realising it. This is the end goal of civilisational mechanics (the meta-theory and this blog).