Unitary, Binary and Trinary:Patterns from known history of human civilization

Excerpt from a complete chain of prompts run:

“A practical way to define your core is to choose three statements you can defend with your life, not with argument.

Examples of the form (not the content you must adopt):

• “I will not lie to gain advantage.”

• “I will not humiliate others to elevate myself.”

• “I will not trade long-term trust for short-term wins.”

Your actual core may be different. The point is that it must be clear enough to guide you when complexity tries to seduce you into ambiguity.

The trinary personal triangle: meaning, reality contact, adaptation

A trinary-capable person holds three corners at once:

• Meaning: why you exist, what you serve, what you refuse to violate.

• Reality contact: truth-seeking, feedback acceptance, willingness to be corrected.

• Adaptation: the ability to change methods, tactics, and models without losing meaning.

Many people are strong in one corner and weak in the others. Trinary capability is balance.

If you have meaning without reality contact, you become dogmatic. If you have reality contact without meaning, you become cynical or aimless. If you have adaptation without meaning, you become opportunistic. If you have adaptation without reality contact, you become self-deceptive.

This triangle is the internal version of the governance triangle. A society cannot be trinary if its individuals are not practicing this balance at scale.”

COPOP outline

(Each chapter includes a prompt you can paste into GenAI to draft that chapter in your voice.)

Book-level Prompt 0 — Set the rules of the book (voice, scope, method)

“Co-author a book titled ‘Patterns from known history of human civilization’. The goal is to extract reusable patterns (not write a textbook timeline). Use crisp metaphors and keep claims falsifiable. Whenever you present a pattern, include: (a) what it explains, (b) what it predicts, (c) how it can be wrong, (d) what it implies for individuals, organizations, and nations. Maintain a ‘meaningful core’ lens and a triadic-balance lens. Ask me 8 calibration questions first (voice, audience, risk appetite, preferred examples, religious/philosophical bounds, and what topics to avoid).”

Part I — The craft of seeing patterns (without hallucinating them)

Chapter 1 — What a “civilizational pattern” is (and isn’t)

Prompt:

“Draft Chapter 1 to define ‘pattern’ vs ‘story’ vs ‘ideology.’ Introduce guardrails: survivorship bias, recency bias, overfitting, and moralizing history. Include a simple method: observe → compress → test → revise.”

Chapter 2 — The Pattern Engine: circles, triangles, and bounded exploration

Prompt:

“Draft Chapter 2 explaining why triangles compress meaning and circles bound exploration. Show how the same lens scales from self → team → org → institution → nation. Include 2 short examples: one that fits, one that breaks the lens, and what we learn.”

Chapter 3 — The “meaningful core” prerequisite

Prompt:

“Draft Chapter 3 on why a stable core is the prerequisite for expanding into consequential unknowns. Contrast core with dogma. Provide diagnostics to detect when ‘core’ becomes a cage.”

Part II — Three operating eras (unitary → binary → trinary) as dominance mechanics

Chapter 4 — Unitary: kingdoms, empires, and unified strength

Prompt:

“Draft Chapter 4 describing unitary dominance as unified force and vertical compression. Use historical vignettes (no exhaustive chronology). Include what unitary optimized, what it sacrificed, and how it degenerates.”

Chapter 5 — Binary: industry, blocs, platforms, and alliance squeeze

Prompt:

“Draft Chapter 5 describing binary dominance as positioning, coalition-building, standard-setting, and exclusion. Include how information/industrial systems reshape power into networks. Add a section: ‘the moral trap of binary thinking.’”

Chapter 6 — Trinary: intelligence, mesh mastery, and coherence under complexity

Prompt:

“Draft Chapter 6 describing trinary dominance as coherence under complexity—adaptive navigation of the mesh and the mess without glorifying chaos. Convert ‘mastery’ into 4–6 practical capabilities (sensemaking, translation, reconciliation, boundary-setting, protocol design, feedback loops).”

Chapter 7 — The migration problem: why we revert under stress

Prompt:

“Draft Chapter 7 on regression: why people and institutions fall back from trinary to binary or unitary when afraid. Provide a ‘stress-response map’ and practical interventions.”

Part III — Recurring patterns across domains (what repeats, what rhymes)

Chapter 8 — The leverage cycle: tool → system → lever (and the ethics debt)

Prompt:

“Draft Chapter 8 showing how enabling technologies become levers for extraction over time, and how societies can re-enable generativity. Include early warning indicators of ‘lever capture.’”

Chapter 9 — The legitimacy cycle: conquest → administration → narrative → consent

Prompt:

“Draft Chapter 9 on how legitimacy is produced and lost across eras. Distinguish fear-based stability from trust-based stability. Include a triadic legitimacy model (performance, fairness, meaning).”

Chapter 10 — The coordination cycle: hierarchy → market → network → mesh

Prompt:

“Draft Chapter 10 mapping coordination forms to era pressures (speed, scale, trust, complexity). Include what each form hides and what it makes addictive. Add one organizational case example per form.”

Chapter 11 — The reconciliation cycle: conflict as a generator (not just a cost)

Prompt:

“Draft Chapter 11 framing conflict as a triangle that can be degenerative or generative depending on the third corner (agency, protocol, or truth-seeking). Provide a reconciliation protocol that works at interpersonal and institutional levels.”

Part IV — What the pattern implies now (without fortune-telling)

Chapter 12 — The expansion zone: why triangulation is cheaper than dominance

Prompt:

“Draft Chapter 12 arguing that when the expansion zone is vast, triangulation beats unilateral dominance: less security burden, less legitimacy burden, less innovation burden. Use the ocean/dam vs lighthouse metaphor sparingly. Include a section on what triangulation requires (shared constraints, interoperability norms, mutual verification).”

Chapter 13 — Institutions and nations: a trinary governance sketch

Prompt:

“Draft Chapter 13 proposing governance principles for the intelligence era: constraint-first design, protocol over decree, transparency with safety bounds, and subsidiarity for the edge. Include 3 risks and mitigations (monopoly core, manipulative complexity, incoherence).”

Chapter 14 — The personal chapter: how an individual becomes ‘trinary-capable’

Prompt:

“Draft Chapter 14 as a self-migration guide: how a person stabilizes a meaningful core, learns corner-tension thinking, and builds reconciliation habits. Include daily/weekly practices and a ‘core audit’ template.”

Chapter 15 — Falsifiability and humility: how to keep the model alive

Prompt:

“Draft Chapter 15 listing what would falsify the unitary→binary→trinary lens, what would refine it, and how future evidence could split it into multiple branches. End with an invitation: readers contribute patterns with proof and counterproof.”

Epilogue — A short invitation to the reader

Prompt:

“Write an epilogue that invites readers to treat the book as a living pattern map, not a doctrine. End with three questions that trigger reflection rather than agreement.”