The Global Unraveling

This paper introduces a structural account of why modern instability differs from all historical cases of civilizational collapse. Previous civilizations failed within regional systems that possessed external buffers, independent identities, and bounded information environments. The contemporary world does not. Humanity now operates inside a single global coherence system, where orientation, boundaries, and information flow are planetary in scale.The paper argues that the primary vulnerability of the modern world is not material scarcity or institutional weakness, but the loss of shared meaning, shared boundaries, and shared information under global information density. This process—global decoherence—produces a form of instability that cannot be understood through classical collapse models. Replacement coherence systems such as sports, fanatic politics, and fanatic belief systems provide temporary stability while deepening fragmentation.The analysis does not predict collapse. Instead, it identifies the structural conditions under which global coordination becomes difficult to sustain. The framework clarifies why local shocks propagate globally, why institutions struggle to maintain legitimacy, and why coherence has become the central requirement for stability in a planetary information system.