A Study of Civilizational Rise and Decline From the Perspectives of LEFFLA, HIAM, and Feedback Time

his study addresses the paradoxical question: Why do civilizations that successfully overcome one crisis collapse in a subsequent one? Its objective is to clarify the structural mechanisms underlying long-term civilizational resilience and breakdown. Rather than attributing decline to external shocks, moral decay, or contingent events, this research focuses on an endogenous dynamic in which success itself generates the conditions for future vulnerability. The central analytical concept introduced is LEFFLA (Latent Evaluative-free Floating Locus of Abeyance). LEFFLA refers to latent elements retained within a system without being evaluated or integrated into its formal reference framework. These include indeterminate human capital, non-institutionalized knowledge, and pluralistic cognitive spaces. Civilizations overcome crises by mobilizing LEFFLA accumulated prior to the crisis. However, in doing so, they convert Flux (fluid potential) into Stock (institutionalized structures and fixed arrangements). While this conversion is rational and effective in the short term, it dismantles the very structures that had generated LEFFLA—often in the name of efficiency—thereby impeding its regeneration. Through comparative analysis of six civilizations—Japan (Tokugawa to Showa), Rome (Republic to Empire), Tang China, Islamic civilization, the United States, and Ethiopia—the following hypotheses are derived: - Civilizational resilience depends on the preservation of indeterminate diversity (LEFFLA). - Crisis response entails a Flux-to-Stock conversion, and success accelerates the compression of LEFFLA. - When the frequency of crises falls below the time required for LEFFLA regeneration, recovery becomes structurally impossible (asymmetry of feedback time). - When a MANES (Meaning Anchor for Narrative and Existential Significance)—a deep anchor that provides existential and narrative legitimacy to order—exists beyond institutional structures, political collapse does not necessarily entail civilizational collapse. - When channels of external Flux inflow are blocked, the system becomes closed and rigid. This study theorizes civilizational rise and decline not as moral deterioration or accidental failure, but as a dynamic process in which rational efficiency structurally prepares the ground for subsequent fragility. By doing so, it attempts to formulate a cross-civilizational, generalizable mechanism of historical transformation.