A polity can hollow without being hijacked, and can be hijacked without being hollow. These are two distinct failure modes of the civilisational slow-loop — institutional atrophy on one axis, ideological capture on the other — and the most dangerous configurations live in the corner where both rise together. The matrix below plots fifteen modern polities at their most recent year. Tap any polity to see its trajectory and component breakdown; drag the slider to compare snapshots between 1900 and 2026.
The two indices measure structurally distinct failure modes that must not be conflated. A polity can have high deliberative decay with relatively neutral Lore — slow institutional rot without ideological capture. Or it can have a well-functioning deliberative apparatus that has been captured and redirected toward kinetic legitimation — the 1914 pattern.
All pairwise inter-node bonds are computed from raw C·K·S·A on the canonical 1–10 scale, bypassing the scale incompatibility between CAMNATIONS5 ensemble files (BS ~1–44), MARKER families, and older datasets (BS ~0.5–4.7). This produces directionally consistent bonds across all loaded polities.
Four components, IQR-normalised against the global cross-polity-year distribution, negated (since each healthy reading reduces decay), and squashed through a sigmoid:
where Λ = (B̄_Lore · B̄_Archive)/S_Hands is the Library Attractor, Helm_rel = V_Helm/V̄ captures the Scissors Effect precursor, B̄_Stewards is the mean pairwise bond strength of the resource-governance node (floor signal), and ΔC_Archive is the five-year rolling change in Archive coherence.
Three components capturing whether Lore has been captured into directional negentropy service rather than integrative coupling:
where B_Lore,Shield / B_Lore,Archive is the directional bond ratio (now computable from raw scores), V_Lore − V_Hands is the Mythic-Material Decoupling signature, and A_Lore − C_Lore flags symbolic potency without internal logical consistency.
The Germany 1900–1945 arc anchors the historical envelope. Pre-WWI Lore activation (1910–1914) elevates LMI before DDI saturates, validating the causal precedence claim. The 1933 Nazi consolidation lowers DDI temporarily (coercive re-coordination) while LMI peaks at 0.958 by 1940. Total collapse 1945: DDI saturates, LMI crashes as the Lore-generating institution evaporates. The post-war Wirtschaftswunder (1955: DDI 0.24, LMI 0.32) demonstrates that recovery is possible.
Normalisation is empirical, not absolute. A DDI of 0.6 means “in the upper third of all observed polity-years across the 1900–2026 window in this dataset”, not a fixed thermodynamic threshold. Cross-polity rankings are more reliable than absolute interpretation. The five-year archive trend is sensitive to dataset density (Canada, Sweden, Thailand, and the United States ensemble files are decade-stamped rather than annual; trajectories interpolate between sparse anchors). South African data ends in 1986. When the slider is dragged to a year for which a polity has no data within ±3 years, that polity is hidden from the snapshot rather than shown at its nearest available reading.
Low DDI · Low LMI: the healthy baseline; capacity for self-correction intact.
High DDI · Low LMI: institutional atrophy; recoverable through investment.
Low DDI · High LMI: ideological capture with deliberative residue; medium-term danger.
High DDI · High LMI: the war-ready attractor; the 1914 configuration. Slow-loop both decayed and redirected.