Terrestrial Civilization Operating Systems: A Unified Framework for Six Human Civilizations

Field notes compiled from observation of six major terrestrial civilization operating systems identified in terrestrial human societies: Sinic, Japanese, Hindu, Islamic, Western, and Russian. The framework begins with a diagram mapping the common operating principles shared by all six systems, followed by six individual analyses. Each civilization is modeled as a complete moral operating system, analyzed through a universal dual-axis framework (Moral Compliance / Moral Violation × Peer Relations / Authority Relations). The framework identifies the structural logic governing each OS's four quadrants, supplementary rules, and switching mechanisms. This methodology treats civilizations not as cultural narratives to be interpreted but as operating systems to be reverse-engineered.

Version 2.0 (June 2026) — Changelog. Substantive change: the moral axis of the Western Civilization Operating System has been revised — its poles are now Voluntariness (moral positive pole) and Coercion (moral negative pole), replacing the previous "Cooperation / Coercion" formulation. This more precisely captures the procedural, consent-based nature of the Western OS's positive pole: the axis tracks whether an interaction proceeds through each party's own will (voluntariness) rather than by force or threat (coercion), independent of whether the parties happen to be cooperating. This substantive revision affects only the Western Civilization OS diagram and the corresponding section of the main framework document (PDF). All files have been re-uploaded, but for the remaining five civilization diagrams and the common-principles diagram the changes are purely technical — updating the embedded persistent-identifier reference (now the concept DOI) and the version/filename labels; their analytical content is unchanged.