The Macro Instability Index and early warning signs of an approaching transition

This essay is the fourth installment in the series on dreams and phase transitions. It turns the metaphor operational. Having established that instability is the main symptom of impending second-order phase transition, the essay introduces the Macro Instability Index (MII) as a “pressure gauge” that aggregates major drivers of systemic stress—conflict, displacement, unrest, outbreak burden, and antisemitism—and pairs it with early warning signs (EWS) as a “resilience gauge”: signals such as slowing recovery that often precede regime shifts. The goal is to forecast probabilities rather than dates: to distinguish a system that is merely strained from one that is both highly loaded and losing the capacity to return to baseline. Our predictive model shows that we are at the critical level of social instability—the highest since the input parameters have been systematically tracked. That indicates that we are on the verge of a major phase transition—”redemption in its time” (geulah b’itah). In the final installment, we will translate diagnosis into action: how individuals and communities can hasten the “accelerated redemptions” (“geulah achishena”).

In my recent essay “G‑d Who Dreams: Creation, Companionship, and the Entropic Imagination,” I explored the classical metaphor of creation as a divine dream. In the next essay, “Phase Transitions I: Sleep Architecture of Joseph’s Dreams,” I proposed a correspondence between the architecture of sleep and Joseph’s life. In the last essay, “Phase Transitions in Human History,” I showed how Jewish history can be viewed as a series of phase transitions. Here, we examine the signs of the imminently approaching redemption.

As I wrote in the previous essay in this series, classical Jewish sources, including the Talmud, Midrash, biblical commentators, Kabbalah, and Ḥasidut, all portray Exile (Galut) as a dream. The messianic redemption that will take us out of the Exile can come in two ways.

The prophet says:

I, the Lord, in its time I will hasten it. (Isaiah 60:22)

Talmudic Sages read this as two possible timelines for the arrival of redemption. The Talmud (tr. Sanhedrin) resolves the tension: if we merit, redemption comes suddenly—aḥishenah (“I will hasten it”); if we do not merit, it arrives at the destined time—be’itah (“in its time”).

In this installment, we ask the question this series has been building toward—how close are we to the ultimate redemption? In the previous essay, I proposed that these two possible types of redemption, geulah aḥishenah and geulah be’itah, correspond to the two types of phase transitions in systems dynamics—first-order and second-order transitions. In physics, a first-order phase transition is discontinuous (like ice melting to water). In contrast, a second-order transition is continuous but marked by diverging fluctuations (like iron acquiring magnetic properties below the Curie point). I suggest that geulah aḥishenah resembles the former; geulah be’itah resembles the latter. Figure 1 illustrates these two paths. As discussed there, the main symptom of the approaching second-order transition is increasing instability in the system. If so, as we approach geulah b’itah, we should expect a significant increase in instability.

Figure 1. Two Paths to Geulah, by GPT 5.2

To estimate the level of instability (as a proxy measure of the closeness of the second-order phase transition), we will develop the Macro Instability Index (MII) as a “pressure gauge” that aggregates major drivers of systemic stress—conflict, displacement, unrest, outbreak burden, and antisemitism. The predictive model we built........

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