Substantive Research
A Six-Paper Series
A unified analytical framework from diagnosis through mechanism to application — identifying the structural conditions of civilisational flourishing, their dismantling, and what reconstruction requires.
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IPaper 1Lost Coherence
Unified Social Energy, the Monument Problem, and the Structural Conditions of Civilisational Flourishing. Establishes the diagnostic foundation: why ancient civilisations produced monument-scale collective capacity, what modernity has systematically dismantled, and the functional requirements any viable alternative must satisfy.
Published — March 2026 -
IIPaper 2Thus Spake Ilos
Applies Darwinian selection theory and Madisonian institutional analysis to the religious tradition that provided the vertical trust transmission technology Lost Coherence identifies as the unsolved problem of post-religious modernity. The question is structural: what properties of a behavioural code determine civilisational survival, and what the evidence of religious selection reveals about the functional architecture of the societies that adopted it.
Published — April 2026 -
IIIPaper 3The Threshold
Examines the developmental conditions under which human maturity is actually completed, and what the modern institutional and cultural environment has done to those conditions. Resolves a genuine tension in the developmental literature that is almost never addressed honestly — and its implications for what the atomisation process is producing at population scale are more disturbing than the fertility data alone suggests.
Published — April 2026 -
IVPaper 4The Cage We Built
Examines the modern depression epidemic as a structural phenomenon rather than a clinical one. The standard explanatory frameworks — neurochemical, social, economic — address symptoms without identifying the generative mechanism. This paper proposes one. The argument is sex-differentiated, the evidence cross-disciplinary, and the political consequences of what the data shows are examined directly.
Published — June 2026 -
VPaper 5The Narrow Way
How a tradition regrows its energetic core — the demanding, self-defending fraction every living tradition transmits — and why the obvious pathway is the dangerous one. Draws on the radicalisation literature to isolate the variables that separate renewal from catastrophe, and specifies the structural features a tradition must install to regrow its core safely.
Published — June 2026 -
VIPaper 6The Invisible Way
Applies the preceding framework to fertility restoration. Every pro-natal financial policy attempted across the developed world over three decades has failed — this paper argues they were aimed at the wrong layer. Cash transfers operate downstream of the conformity pathway that actually governs family-formation at population scale. Specifies the policy architecture the state can build to reach the layer that matters.
Published — June 2026