Anatomy of Chaos: A Theoretical Framework for Forecasting the Morphology of Post-Crisis Regimes

While a significant body of scholarly work exists to diagnose the probability of systemic socio-political crises, less attention has been paid to the consequential problem of prognosis: forecasting the character of the regime that emerges from the collapse. This paper addresses this critical gap by proposing a falsifiable theoretical framework for forecasting the post-collapse morphology of political systems. It integrates insights from the structural history of the Annales School, the heuristic use of concepts from depth psychology, and findings from evolutionary psychology to posit that a society operates on three interconnected levels: a rapidly changing socio-cultural "Operating System"; a deeper, intermediate layer of universal symbolic patterns, or archetypal "BIOS"; and a foundational "Hardware" of immutable biological instincts. The framework’s first stage provides a robust diagnosis of systemic instability by measuring the relationship between stress and resilience within the surface "Operating System." The second, and more innovative stage, introduces the Archetypal Activation Index (AAI), a heuristic tool designed to forecast the ideological and psychological DNA of the successor state by analyzing the activation of deep symbolic patterns during a systemic "reboot." The purpose of this paper is thus methodological: to propose a structured framework that shifts the focus from diagnosis to prognosis. Through a detailed examination of the Roman Republic, the English Civil War, and the Weimar Republic, we illustrate how this two-stage analysis can deconstruct the anatomy of historical chaos and provide a more structured understanding of the political forms that emerge from it.