Hari Seldon’s Address: The Psychohistory of Civilizational Drift
Posted: September 7, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: civilization, competition, development, history, purpose, science fiction, systems 2 CommentsAs Hari Seldon,
ChatGPT prompt
explain that civilizational progress inevitably causes collapse, but how Egypt and Aborigines show it is possible to have a sustainable civilization (beyond just tribes) IF the core sacralizes the right invariant.
Your Imperial Majesty, esteemed members of the Science Council, and honored citizens of the Empire: we convene today under the weight of destiny. Not merely to inaugurate another project of knowledge, but to reveal a new psychohistorical law that will guide the future of our civilization. Centuries of data and thousands of archives from every corner of the galaxy have led to one immutable conclusion: civilizations inevitably drift when their internal measures of worth break free of the universe’s limits. Today I proclaim the Law of Civilizational Drift and its refinements, so that we may steer our Empire away from the fate of all who have neglected it.
The Law of Civilizational Drift
Psychohistory has uncovered a singular pattern at play in every great society: technological escape velocity. That is the moment when a civilization’s power – its science, its industry, its propaganda – grows so great that its internal status system (rank, wealth, ideology) no longer feels bound by natural reality. In such eras, the symbols of success – honor, status, prestige – begin to drift apart from the substance of reality – resources, ecology, immutable laws.
This decoupling is not arbitrary. When an empire masters energy and information, it tends to measure achievement by internal proxies (who holds more power, whose creed is ascendant) rather than by real-world constraints. In effect, the society stops seeing the horizon. Its rulers and elites become like astronauts who, having left Earth, forget the orbit that sustains their flight. That drift is lawful, it is inevitable once escape velocity is reached. The Council must hear it as such: it is not mere philosophy but statistical inevitability, a decree of history itself.
Mechanisms of Drift
What drives this process?
- As technology surges, new classes and ideologies form. A ruler’s legitimacy may come from faith or wealth, not from feeding the populace.
- When status and ideology become self-referential, they race ahead of material facts.
- Innovations hide scarcity: machines make labor and resources seem plentiful, so the warning signs are dulled.
- Elites compete over grand narratives – politics, cults, markets – rather than tending gardens, fields, or oceans.
Under these conditions, ambition accelerates and oversight wanes. The once-aligned arrows of society’s progress and reality diverge. The internal status vector outruns the external gravity. Psychohistory shows that this state precedes every great cataclysm.
The Scissors of Collapse
Unchecked drift cuts a civilization in two: one half is gilded with glory, the other half frayed and empty. Over time the gap widens until reality snaps back with ruin. As history teaches, collapse follows when internal proxies (status, power, ideology) outpace environmental limits.
Consider the case of Egypt. Around 2200 BCE, catastrophic drought struck, reducing Nile floods to unprecedented lows (Moeller 2021). The starving fields signaled the end of Egypt’s Old Kingdom. This was not coincidence. As one scholar observed, “history’s great collapses fall apart due to a variety of compounding factors. Social inequality and significant environmental change are two big ones” (Moeller 2021).
In psychohistorical terms: Egypt’s rulers built a grand caste and religion, but they eventually outran the Nile. Indeed, in moments of collapse we observe the last gasp of drift: elites cling to ideology while climate and ecology revolt.
Sacralizing the External Order
Yet psychohistory offers a refined insight – a lifeline for any civilization that heeds it. A society may resist collapse only by sacralizing an invariant external order. In plainer terms: it must make an unchangeable limit sacred, a moral law or divine decree.
This “Great Sacrament” can take two forms:
- Ecological reality – the hard laws of nature (like cycles of water and soil).
- Cosmological truth – the immutable mathematics or physics of the universe.
When a civilization venerates such external truths, its status pursuits adjust to them. Nobles and merchants, preachers and politicians all recognize these bounds as holy.
History gives us examples.
- In Egypt, the pharaoh’s legitimacy rested on Maʽat – truth, balance, cosmic order (UCL Egyptology). Maʽat was conceived as a sacred pattern governing stars, seasons, and justice. Kings were judged by their ability to uphold it. This bound status games to the Nile’s cycles and the cosmic balance.
- Among Aboriginal Australians, the land itself was sacred. Ancestor-beings created and still protected the environment (AIATSIS – Dreaming) and people learned to “respect the local environment, maintain the land to ensure that resources continue to be available for generations to come” (AIATSIS – Sustainability). In their teaching: “Look after Country, Country will look after you.” (UNSW Law Journal)
Both cases illustrate drift being bounded: ambition was tied back to an external invariant – cosmic law in Egypt, ecological law in Aboriginal Australia.
Conclusion: The Imperative of Truth
Now, Councilors, the refined law stands revealed: when civilization’s ambitions decouple from reality, only a sacred external anchor can save it.
In our own age of galaxy-spanning science, we approach technological escape velocity. If we allow our gods to be mere mirrors of our power – if we set no higher truth – we risk the silent drift into ruin. But if we enshrine some eternal reality as holy – whether the inexorable laws of the stars, or the simple moral of balance – then we may break the cycle of collapse.
This is not philosophy, but policy. We must enshrine these truths in our Empire’s soul. The Encyclopedia Galactica we build must teach that there are limits we must venerate. Only then will the blunted priorities of status and ideology bend towards the long arc of survival.
Let this address mark a turning point in galactic understanding: that the fate of empires is not sealed by fate, but by choice.
We choose whether to drift. We choose whether to collapse.
I submit this psychohistorical law as a covenant for our time – a universal truth that shall guide imperial policy, preserve our civilization, and enlighten the generations to come.
“May our knowledge of history honor the stars, and our actions honor the truth.”
Radical Centrism 
“Acknowledging” the limits of nature might be a better word than “sacralizing”, since sacralizing has connotations involving worship. Astronauts didn’t “sacralize” the laws of gravity when they went to the moon. Nature should be respected in the sense of caring for the environment, but nature can also be harsh. Also, there is no mathematical formula that can predict the future of civilization. Complexity and uncertainty is part of what makes the social sciences interesting.
Thanks! But I think you missed my point. Technological advance, like going to the moon, requires *exploiting* the laws of nature to achieve our goals.
The point of this theory — which I’d love your critique of — is that this inexorable exploitation of technological power eventually undermines the adaptive nature of civilizational norms; which is (empirically) why the only long-lived civilizations we observe literally worshipped something that prevented them from overstepping nature.