Rationality Without Transition: Why Advanced Civilizations Remain Trapped in an Animalistic Mode of Survival

Overview This paper serves as the conceptual core and overview DOI for a series of theoretical papers examining the ontological limits of modern civilization in the age of artificial intelligence. It introduces a single foundational proposition capable of unifying a wide range of contemporary crises—including AI-driven labor displacement, geopolitical conflict, demographic decline, social isolation, and the erosion of meaning—within a shared explanatory framework. The central claim is that no degree of rational or technological advancement can move a civilization beyond survival-based cognition as long as life is understood as a collection of separated, self-subsistent entities. Under this ontological assumption, rationality does not transcend biological survival reflexes (fight, flight, freeze) but instead refines, legitimizes, and institutionalizes them. Modern civilization, therefore, did not fail to overcome animalistic survival; it civilized survival without transcending it. Rather than treating contemporary crises as independent or domain-specific problems, this paper argues that they are convergent symptoms of a single ontological limitation: the fixation of life as a static noun while rational systems are continuously intensified. Artificial intelligence plays a decisive role in exposing this limitation by surpassing human capabilities precisely in the domains—function, optimization, and instrumental reasoning—that modern civilization has implicitly treated as the foundation of human worth. The resulting destabilization across political, social, and existential domains is not accidental but reflects the simultaneous exposure of a shared civilizational operating system. This paper is not a moral critique, political manifesto, or technological warning. Instead, it functions as an ontological diagnostic—a litmus test for identifying the developmental stage of a civilization based on how it understands life itself. It deliberately refrains from prescribing solutions, asserting only that any genuine transition beyond survival-based civilization depends on a fundamental shift in ontological understanding from static entities to generative and relational processes. Subsequent papers in this series elaborate, formalize, and translate this core proposition across domains, including artificial intelligence, political order, demography, institutional design, and civilizational theory. All related works explicitly reference this overview paper as their conceptual anchor.