Introduction to P-Civilization Theory
A Civilization Optimized for the Short Term
Twenty-first century civilization is prosperous in aggregate, yet strangely unstable in lived experience.
Technology advances at exponential speed. Capital circulates across the globe on a scale once unimaginable. Corporations post record profits year after year.
And yet our lives do not feel proportionally more secure.
Many explanations have been offered for this imbalance: the limits of capitalism, demographic shifts, geopolitical volatility.
But behind these factors lies a simpler, more fundamental structure.
Modern civilization is built around a single dominant axis: short-termism.
Corporations are judged by quarterly earnings. Policies must conform to election cycles. Individual livelihoods are constantly exposed to short-term indicators.
Such a system excels at rapid optimization—but it is structurally weak at sustaining long-term stability.
Recent advances in AI and robotics further destabilize this equilibrium. They reduce the labor force while simultaneously shrinking the consumer base.
Politics, economics, and marketing treat “workers,” “consumers,” and “data providers” as separate categories, but in reality these are merely different aspects of the same person.
And automation—especially in AI—spreads not to cut costs alone but to secure competitive advantage.
It accelerates during booms and recessions alike. Once a domain is automated, it never returns to human hands.
Think of your own workplace.
Have you ever sat in a meeting titled something like, “Can we streamline this with AI?”
Are you certain your own tasks were not—directly or indirectly—part of that discussion?
Industrial automation unfolded over decades, giving society time to adapt.
But the replacement of cognitive work by AI is happening on a timescale of only a few years.
The deeper problem is that no one knows where the breaking point lies.
Perhaps the economy continues functioning even when 30% of workers are automated away.
But what about 40%?
50%?
At some threshold, the consumer base collapses, and companies simply lose their customers.
By the time governments rush to impose regulation, it is too late.
Automated systems cannot be reverted to manual operation—not technically, not economically.
Civilizational decline appears not as a sudden catastrophe, but as a long, silent abrasion.
This is why we need a second mechanism of coordination—one that acts not in response to crisis, but in anticipation of it.
Praise as a Second Axis
This book does not propose abandoning capital.
On the contrary, it accepts the overwhelming power of capital as a given—and introduces a parallel axis designed to extend the lifespan of civilization.
That axis is Praise.
Praise here does not mean flattery or personal approval; it is a measurable form of long-term civilizational trust.
Praise is a civilizational-scale instrument that measures forms of value money cannot capture:
the long-term contributions and accumulated social trust of individuals, communities, and institutions.
It functions as a form of Long-term Trust Credit.
The technical details of how such credit can be measured—how we might quantify contributions that unfold across decades, how we prevent gaming, how to keep such measurements rigorous, interpretable, and decentralized—will be addressed in later chapters.
It is enough, at this stage, to recognize that Praise is not a metaphor.
It is a system that can be designed.
If capital measures short-term performance,
Praise measures long-term contribution.
Consider the following:
An engineer who spends a decade maintaining critical open-source infrastructure used by millions.
Community organizers whose steady, years-long efforts reduce local crime rates.
Researchers who pursue foundational work that may yield breakthroughs only decades from now, far beyond commercial time horizons.
These contributions are essential for civilization’s continuity, yet they appear nowhere in quarterly reports—often nowhere in national statistics at all.
ESG and CSR frameworks describe corporate behavior, but they do not quantify long-term civilizational impact.
Even when we know what an organization did, we cannot measure what those actions meant for society.
Capital is a system for guaranteeing short-term credit: it tells us who can pay tomorrow.
But it cannot tell us who will still be standing in twenty years.
And so we demand ever more capital, accumulating it far beyond what operational reality requires, seeking reassurance against the fog of long-term uncertainty.
But what if that fog could be lifted by another axis?
If so, the question shifts from “what is happening to us” to “how might we design a system that sees farther than we can as individuals.”
What if nations, corporations, and local communities could have their long-term contributions measured and made transparent?
How would our investments, our behaviors, our decisions change?
When Two Axes Interlock
With Praise, long-term contributions become visible.
The side effects of short-term optimization can be identified before they crystallize into irreversible damage.
The fast turn of capital, and the slow accumulation of Praise—
when these two tempos interlock, civilization can balance short-term efficiency with long-term stability.
Individuals, firms, and states all regain room to pursue strategies that endure.
The goal here is not a utopia.
It is a structural design philosophy grounded in the realities of human behavior and the nature of capital.
P-Civilization Theory is an attempt to design that structure.
The question is no longer whether we need a second axis.
It is whether we can begin building it—carefully, realistically—before the window closes.
The two-axis model proposed here—bringing Praise alongside capital—may of course be judged unrealistic.
Concerns about subjectivity, loopholes, administrative burden, or cultural resistance are entirely reasonable.
But the point of articulating a second axis is not to insist on a single grand design.
It is to open a space for debate: to show that long-term credit, if made visible, can reshape incentives in ways that short-term optimization cannot.
Even if the full structure described in this theory is never adopted, smaller, more practical modifications may emerge—adjustments that societies can accept without upheaval.
This work is written in the hope that such conversations can begin, and that the search for those minimal, workable changes can proceed from here.