Scale-Mismatch, Lyapunov Stability, and Post-Attractor Decision Regimes

This paper develops a dynamical-systems account of civilizational stability under conditions of timescale mismatch, weak consensus, and post-attractor transition. The central claim is that many contemporary disagreements in public academic discourse do not arise primarily from opposing positions, insufficient rigor, or lack of information, but from an unmodeled shift in system timescales. Historical and slow-variable models often assume that corrective mechanisms operate faster than amplification processes. When amplification dynamics approach or exceed correction dynamics, inherited stability conclusions lose structural validity while still appearing locally reasonable within their original domains. The paper…