The High‑Arousal Collapse: Poverty, Evolutionary Mismatch, and the Broken Social Contract

This essay extends the SignalRupture Social Infrastructure Theory by examining how modern societies engineer chronic instability through poverty, austerity, oligarchic extraction, and high‑arousal conditions. It argues that contemporary infrastructures no longer support human life but instead extract from it, breaking the evolutionary, social, and Hobbesian contract that once stabilized human existence. The piece analyzes how service cuts, financial “optimization,” demographic decline, and the evolution of exploitative labor structures converge into a single systemic pattern: a population forced into permanent physiological overload while institutions deny causality. Positioned within the SignalRupture canon, this work frames high‑arousal society as the embodied consequence of infrastructural collapse and identifies poverty as the core engine of modern instability. It offers a structural diagnosis of a system that treats citizens as resources rather than humans, producing predictable social, biological, and generational breakdowns.