Comparative Metrology of Civilizational Interaction: From Competitive Fragmentation to Constructive Coordination

Abstract

This paper proposes a comparative metrology of civilizational interaction within Vitology. The framework distinguishes cultural and institutional diversity from destructive fragmentation and compares interaction architectures according to their effects on multilevel viability. A civilizational configuration is considered comparatively more viable when it enables its constituent systems to preserve identity and functional autonomy while reducing unnecessary systemic costs, maintaining regenerative capacity, supporting adaptive exchange, generating mutually beneficial knowledge and technologies, and avoiding recurrent transfer of damage between levels. Competitive interaction may generate innovation, differentiation, and adaptive pressure and therefore cannot automatically be classified as detrimental. However, when competition becomes structurally dependent on information confrontation, economic coercion, cognitive manipulation, resource depletion, arms races, or recurrent military conflict, maintaining the competitive architecture itself may consume increasing proportions of the resources required for regeneration and development. Conversely, cooperation is not assumed to be intrinsically viable. Coordination that suppresses diversity, eliminates feedback, concentrates irreversible dependence, or protects inefficient structures may also reduce viability. The proposed framework therefore introduces Constructive Coordination as a distinct analytical category: interaction in which the viability gains of one component do not systematically require viability losses in another and in which local gains remain compatible with the regenerative and developmental capacity of the larger system. The concept of a Constructive Civilization is consequently formulated not as a predetermined geopolitical project, but as a testable limiting model of civilizational organization characterized by increasing cross-level compatibility of viability. Keywords: Vitology, viability, civilizational metrology, Constructive Civilization, Constructive Coordination, fragmentation, cooperation, competition, systemic noise, multilevel viability, CLVA, CLVC.