The Legal Order of Progress: Human Finitude and the Constitutional Structure of Civilizational Fragility

Modern civilization is organized by a civilizational constitution: a distributed legal-economic order that codes and stabilizes authority, property, investment, infrastructure, and risk, functioning as a constitutional object in the analytic sense rather than a single written text. The paper advances a selection claim: this order systematically rewards a vector of vertical growth (scale, speed, integration, optimization, capital mobility) while underproducing horizontal capacities (redundancy, slack, repair, epistemic coverage, democratic control), so fragility emerges as an equilibrium property of the background rules rather than as an accidental sequence of policy failures. The consequence is that the order can recognize crises and manage them episodically, yet cannot reliably reward the resilience forms needed to prevent crisis accumulation; the paper therefore proposes a viability constitution as an alternative design target for re-indexing progress toward governable complexity and survivable social life.