In the early 20th century, Albert Einstein reshaped how we understand the universe. His theory of general relativity revealed that space and time are not fixed backgrounds but dynamic fabrics, curved by mass and energy.
In a much more modest spirit, I'd like to suggest that something similar is possible in how we think about societies.
Over the past year, I've worked with AI on a framework that gives us quantitative tools to think systematically about the forces that help societies thrive, stumble, or fall apart. At its core, CAMS tries to shift how we see civilisation — not as a story of great leaders and crises, but as a living system shaped by tension between two forces: entropy and coordination.
Entropy and Coordination: A Civilisational Tug-of-War
Every society faces a basic struggle. On one side is entropy — disorder, confusion, fragmentation. It shows up when institutions break down, when trust frays, when information floods in faster than it can be understood.
On the other side is coordination — the effort to pull things together. Align people's goals, build shared meaning, organise resources, make decisions. In physics, it takes energy to resist entropy. In society, it takes information, time, and trust.
CAMS offers a way to measure this balance. If a society is doing enough coordination "work" to hold entropy at bay, it tends to stay stable or even improve. But if entropy starts to outpace coordination — if disorder outgrows our capacity to respond — systems become brittle.
This isn't just theoretical. Consider China in 1976, following years of chaos during the Cultural Revolution. At that point, the CAMS model would describe its system health as dangerously low — trust eroded, institutions misaligned. But over the next few decades, through reform, pragmatism, and deliberate reorganisation, China reversed course. It didn't become utopian — far from it — but it restored a kind of systemic balance that enabled rapid development and renewed coherence.
Seeing Societies as Adaptive Systems
CAMS invites us to think of societies not as static structures, but as adaptive organisms. They evolve. They remember. They heal. They sometimes collapse.
What matters, according to this framework, is how well a society adapts to pressure — and whether its internal forces are pulling together or spinning apart.
Some stress can actually make a society stronger. But when stress rises sharply and coordination is weak, collapse becomes more likely. Italy in the 1940s is an example. As the pressures of war, inequality, and failing leadership mounted, the country's system broke down. But with time and effort — through rebuilding institutions and realigning ideals with everyday needs — Italy recovered and grew again.
The Four Forces That Shape System Health
CAMS focuses on four variables that, in combination, help shape how societies evolve:
Capacity — the resources, knowledge, and institutional depth a society can draw upon.
Stress — the pressures on the system: economic, political, environmental, or cultural.
Abstraction — the complexity of a society's ideas and systems, and how well they match lived reality.
These are not meant as final truths, but as working tools. CAMS treats them as coordinates in a kind of social space-time. Some societies live in stable gravity wells; others teeter near cliffs. By observing how these forces interact, we might better anticipate turning points — and spot paths back to health.
Case Studies: A Few Illustrative Journeys
Norway shows what stability looks like: high coherence, low stress, strong coordination. Its strength may lie in its culture of balance and consensus.
Singapore offers an example of deliberate adaptation — consciously aligning abstract ideals with real-world execution, often through rigorous policy feedback loops.
The modern West, by contrast, faces rising stress and declining coherence. Fragmentation, polarisation, and a widening gap between political ideals and lived experience point to what CAMS would describe as an "abstraction drift." It's not destiny, but it is a warning.
None of these cases are perfect. CAMS doesn't pretend to explain them fully. But by tracking these forces, we begin to see why some systems strain and others hold.
Societies as Sybonds
One idea that emerged from CAMS is to view societies as sybonds — symbiotic bonds between people, institutions, and culture. Like a body, a society has organs (nodes), memory, and metabolism. When the bonds are strong, the system functions. When they fray, dysfunction sets in.
CAMS simply tries to quantify those relationships in a way that lets us spot where interventions might help: which bonds are overstressed? Where is trust eroding? Which ideas have drifted too far from reality?
If this model helps decision-makers or communities reflect on those questions, that alone would justify the work. It's one lens among many. But it can help us ask better questions:
How much stress can our system absorb? Where is entropy creeping in? Are our shared ideas aligned with what people actually live? What bonds need healing before the system strains further?
A Closing Thought
If CAMS is useful, it's because it makes us see the obvious more clearly: societies don't survive by accident. They endure through work — coordinated, continuous, informed work.
In a sense, this framework is less about answers than about awareness. It asks us to treat civilisation with the care we would give any living system — one that can get sick, but also heal, learn, and adapt.