A colleague from the WiseValue group, Tim, has been part of our weekly conversations exploring what a post-money coordination system would need to do — not just what it would need to displace. What follows is his own working-through of that ground, in his own voice: starting from foundational principles of voluntary participation and non-compulsory authority, and arriving at something close to what we’ve called direct value handling — coordination through narrative and pattern recognition rather than through scores, ratings or proxy values.
Foreword
When one of my students of English, or anybody else, asks me “How are you?”, my reply is always the same: “On top of the world!” Now, that may be a self-fulfilling prophecy, cosmic ordering or ‘we live the life that we choose’ It doesn’t matter how you explain it. It works. I say it and then I am.
Ghandi once described himself as a pragmatic idealist – head in the clouds but with both feet firmly on the ground. I am not one for attaching labels, especially to myself, but I rather like ‘pragmatic idealist’ People say I’m a dreamer and I am. On the other hand, I can only deal with theory if you can put it into practice. I used to tell the teachers in my team, “If the theory doesn’t match your experience at the chalk-face, then revise the theory so it fits.” Your hands-on experience almost always provides the best understanding.
I suppose over the last year or so, since I joined the Wise Value group, I have come to believe that we can all feel good about ourselves and the lives we live. It all depends on what you really value. So learning to value the right kind of things seems to be the path we should follow.
Right, being an idealist, let’s dream of an ideal world.
There is no rent or mortgage to pay. No council tax or water rates. There is no electric bill to pay. There are no bank charges and no interest payments. There are no fines for bad behaviour.
All because there is no money.
That also means there is housing for everyone, food and drink is abundant, You have enough clothes and shoes. After all you only have two feet. Why would anyone have 76 pairs of shoes in their wardrobe.
The air to breathe is clean, as is the water to drink.
No-one is totally dependent. No-one is totally independent. We are all interdependent.Pinch me and I will wake up.
“Imagine no possessions. I wonder if you can. No need for greed or hunger. A brotherhood of man.
Imagine there’s no countries. It isn’t hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for. And no religion, too.
Imagine all the people, Livin’ life in peace.
Imagine all the people, Sharing all the world.
You may say I’m a dreamer But I’m not the only one”
with the most profound apologies to John Lennon for my plagiarism.What? … How does it work in practice? … Great question. … Let me see. …
1 – Government and the current structural collapse.
The early (19th century) meaning of populism, government in favour of the common man and not an elite, emerged from the clear exploitation of workers that resulted from the industrial revolution. Governance in our lives through government, i.e. the institutions that exercise political authority over a nation state, is no longer working in favour of the people. Democracy is dead (if it ever survived childbirth). That argument is for another time.
Most governments now struggle to plan for long-term development. They are reactive and not proactive. An election every four or five years limits their view of the horizon. Many politicians are now far more concerned with their individual re-election than implementing policies or representing their constituent electors. Manifestos are very 20th-century and where they exist there is no obligation to put them into practice.
At the same time, governments are taking on a fascist semblance, best seen by increased nationalism, strong leadership (21st Century populism, personality politics, Trump, Farage, etc.), a divided society (us and them), weakened institutions, and propaganda through narrative control. More classic signs like militarization, fusion of party and state, and strong corporate influence are all appearing, while still under the disguise of an electoral democracy.
The geopolitical order established in 1945 has gradually declined. The United Nations has become almost totally ineffective. International law is not being applied. Human rights are increasingly denied.
The global economy is failing us all. To work, debt-based capitalism requires ever increasing debt. Debt is one of the main causes of anxiety leading to mental health problems and even suicide. It is detrimental to family relationships, increasing separation and divorce and reducing birth rates. Physical health can be affected and people in debt tend to socially isolate. In the long term, it can reduce life choices, increasing the feeling that we are always a slave to the system.
As revealed to me by Critical Thinking, money as a proxy value leads to violence. While the global economy flails and the wealth gap increases, the number of regional conflicts around the world and their effects increases. The nuclear clock is ready to strike midnight. US hegemony is no more. But, don’t be fooled. A multipolar world will not change anything. Nation states will still be nation states and they will act like nations states, purportedly protecting the interests of their own citizens while acting in a dog-eat-dog capitalist bully world.
The people no longer trust institutions – government, the police, the courts, religious organizations, the media, big corporations – the list goes on. And as trust diminishes, more and more energy is needed to maintain the social order rather than to better the quality of people’s lives.
Current extraction from natural resources is unsustainable. Immediate reward is more important than long-term stewarding. Increasing pressure on natural resources has immediate consequences in the economy, compounding all the above problems.
Other things that are contributing to our downhill direction include the internet and smartphones causing information overload and social atomization, along with the mendacious overselling of AI capabilities and fearmongering its supposed consequences.
Many people are waking up and realizing that we are in the middle of a structural crisis. Different people focus on different aspects. But almost everyone awake seems to agree on a number of main points. The first is that the structure is collapsing. The second is that the speed of collapse is accelerating. The third is that the collapse is critical and the fourth, and perhaps still debatable one, is that it is terminal.
We need a reset. But not the Klaus Schwabb kind. A reset is coming and we all must and will play our part. Whether we become totally controlled slaves to the system or free, healthy, happy human beings depends on our individual contributions.
But that’s enough of the doom and gloom. We need to accept that this is happening but not focus on it, and so, not give it more of our attention and energy than an absolute minimum. The more important questions are what do we want the future to be like and how do we start moving in that direction.2 – A New Form of Governance
Governance is the act or process of governing or overseeing the guidance and direction of something. It can refer to different spheres of management depending on the context.
It is the broad interaction through which decisions are made while freedom is guaranteed.Foundational principles
Any new governance system needs to have clear, well-defined base.
1. Participation: Available to all on an opt-in, opt-out basis at any time.
2. Transparency: Decisions and actions are clear, open, and accessible to all.
3. Accountability: All participants are responsible for their actions and omissions.
4. Rule of Law: No activity shall result in punishment. There is no compulsory authority.
5. Responsiveness: The system is ongoing and dynamic to serve the needs of all participants. There is never an imposed timeframe or a fixed end time.
6. Fairness: The system fully represents all participants. There is no permanent classification among participants. No individual has any permanent advantage. Allocation is fair.Let’s think about these in a bit more detail.
- An opt-in, opt-out basis at any time.
Participation in any governance process, project, or community is voluntary. Every participant retains the unrestricted right to join or leave at any time without coercion or penalty. This means that no individual has authority over any other individual. This then implies that, for anything to happen, individuals have to cooperate. Opting-out at any time is not a problem. It is an advantage. Life already handles unexpected and immediate opting out. What happens at a business if somebody dies or is rushed into hospital. The system adapts to the new situation. If a worker resigns and the company foresees a problem, they can reduce the workable notice to zero days. Opting out is going to provide feedback, useful in adapting for the better.
In any real-life system, commitments are never absolutely enforceable. It is better to opt-out making a graceful handover of responsibilities than no provision at all.
Participation shall never be maintained through coercion. Individuals remain free to withdraw at any time without imposed punishment. The system shall adapt to withdrawal rather than compel continued participation.- Decisions and actions are clear, open, and accessible to all. There are no secrets.
Tranparency engenders trust. Trust engenders cooperation. Cooperation engenders action.
Individual contribution is clear. Everyone can see the whole process.
Good transparency shows how decisions were reached, who contributed, what was taken into consideration and where resources went. The object of transparency is the process, not the person.
Transparency isn’t about exposing people. It’s about exposing the state of the network.
Transparency creates accountability without authority.- All participants are responsible for their actions and omissions. This follows from transparency. The buck stops here. There are no punishments. The practical accountability automatically comes through future needs and contributions. Trust in an individual changes naturally.
You are free to choose to do what you like – but you have to live with the consequences of those choices. Remember that trust is built over time, your reputation is transparent, as is your contribution.- There is no compulsory authority. No activity shall result in punishment. All actions and omissions are handled by natural consequences. The objective of all activity is learning, not blame.
Anarchy is the absence of hierarchy. It is the absence of imposed authority.
Accepted authority occurs when you voluntarily recognise someone’s knowledge, experience or judgement. An implicit provisional hierarchy of accepted authority is possible for an activity or a project. People can lead. People can follow. People can organise.
The governance system contains no compulsory authority. All influence arises from voluntary participation, demonstrated competence, trust and continued consent. No individual or organisation possesses an inherent right to command others.- Responsiveness: The system is ongoing and dynamic to serve the needs of all participants. The current speed and capacity of digital technology enables this to happen. The system must include a safety net where individuals opting out of positive activity get the support they need. Logically, the mechanism should be to create a new need narrative.
Change is the normal state of our reality. Everything changes. People are born. People die. Children become adults.Skills are learned and forgotten. Resources are discovered and depleted. Needs appear and disappear. Trust grows and diminishes. Communities form and dissolve. Knowledge accumulates. (If governance assumes stability, it is already out of date.)
The system is continuously co-evolving with its participants. It is like an ecosystem. It is like a living organism. The system is complex, ongoing and dynamic. There is continuous adaptation and continuous evolution.
Governance must evolve as continuously as the society it serves.- Fairness: The system fully represents all participants. There is no permanent classification
among participants. No individual has any permanent advantage. Allocation is fair.
Fairness depends on opt-in/opt-out so everyone can be included. If participation is voluntary,
then people remain because they believe the system is sufficiently fair. Fairness also depends on transparency. But neither of these two principles automatically produce fairness. From the absence of structural privilege, along with opt-in/out and transparency, fairness emerges.
Allocation is based on transparent information about needs, available resources, agreed priorities, and voluntary participation, without permanent privilege or discrimination.
Suppose ten people all want the same resource. Only one can have it. No governance system can make everyone think the outcome is fair. It can only make the allocation process fair. You can’t guarantee satisfaction for everyone. But, you can design a process that everyone can see has been conducted honestly.Emerging from these principles, static categories are rejected:
• no permanent membership,
• no permanent authority,
• no permanent privilege,
• no permanent trust,
• no permanent obligations,
• no permanent allocation.
And, one last thought about these foundational principles. The same principles could, and probably should, apply to an individual, to a family, to a project, to a community, to a network of similar-interest communities and to a global network. In other words, they shouldn’t merely scale—they should reproduce themselves in some fractal way.Democracy and decisions
If society is made up of coordinated small communities and the coordination is not necessarily geographical, pseudo-democratic decision-making and other delegated representation and/or responsibilities are non-starters. A narrative of pros and cons, where anybody can contribute their two-penneth, can be constructed. A complex coordination system can represent the needs, the resources and the possible decision outcomes. For each outcome, minority interests must be protected or compensated. Any decisions need to emerge over time in this complex system. This differs quite fundamentally from representative democracy, direct democracy, and even most current digital democracy proposals. It is not a new voting system. It is a different conception of governance.
Traditional democracy assumes that governance is tied to geography. If I live inside an electoral boundary, I belong to that political unit. But coordination no longer needs to be geographical. Now communities can be formed by shared purpose, relationship, trust, competence, or need, not necessarily by physical location. And an individual may participate in different communities with different interests. Each community governs only what falls within its own sphere of responsibility. That already removes one of the biggest reasons for delegated representation. There is no need to elect someone to “represent me” in everything. I represent myself in areas of my choice through my participation.
In other words, representation is replaced by contribution. Everyone contributes according to experience, evidence, affected interests, practical knowledge, values, concerns, and creativity.
This produces a growing narrative rather than competing political campaigns. The objective becomes improving the quality of understanding rather than winning votes. Most democratic systems compress a complex issue into a binary question. For example: Plant lettuces? Yes / No.
But now, with a digital coordination system, decision-making can become an evolving narrative. We can ask something like “What are possible ways of satisfying our lettuce-eating needs while minimizing ecological damage and respecting existing community food choices?” The discussion becomes a structured knowledge-building exercise. Everyone can contribute. As new information appears, the narrative evolves. The emergent “decision” is almost a by-product. And, instead of assuming one option is correct. the coordination system will produce a series of relevant narratives
They represent the assessment of the stored collective memory. It openly acknowledges that complex systems rarely have a single obviously correct solution.
In this way, minority interests are always taken into consideration. The proposed system goes further. Every possible outcome can carry a map of who benefits, who loses if anyone, who bears any risk, who receives any opportunity and who needs any compensation. Rather than saying The majority wins. the question becomes “What positives and negatives does each possible outcome create, and how do we put it into practice in the fairest way?” That changes the optimisation problem. Instead of maximizing votes, the system can minimize unfair or harmful actions. Any decisions emerge rather than being imposed.
This proposed governance solution is similar to emergence in complex adaptive systems. Consider an ant colony. No ant votes. No ant governs. Yet coherent behaviour emerges because every ant contributes local information. Similarly, open-source software has no national elections. Scientific consensus is not established by voting. They all rely on iterative contribution, critique, revision, and gradual convergence.
Human governance might increasingly resemble these systems.Time
The complex coordination system is ongoing. That means all decisions are provisional. Evidence changes. Circumstances change. Needs change. In other words, the narrative changes. Therefore, the set of possible solutions changes. Naturally, if there are no fixed timetables, deadlines, and/or settlement dates, the system must have an alternative way of determining when action should be taken. Nobody has authority, but something still has to coordinate. Not command. Coordinate.
Previous work on CAN and real-value coordination provides the answer. The coordinating mechanism is not power. It is information. Specifically, it is the narratives of needs, capacities, constraints, risks, opportunities, and, importantly, those of trust. The platform continuously helps communities discover where alignment is emerging.
The hardest practical problem is knowing when enough understanding has been reached to act. A probability distribution can keep evolving indefinitely. But, at some point, communities must decide whether to implement a course of action. That suggests adding criteria such as: Has the narrative stabilized? Is there any urgency? Is the action somehow reversible? Has the narrative been sufficiently inclusive? Have all the safeguards for a fair outcome been included? These criteria help distinguish between “let’s wait and learn a bit more” and “let’s act now and see what happens.”3 – What next? Theory into practice
What is the digital technology (possibly AI) like? What is it going to do (and, importantly, not going to do)?
Capacity
Digital technology can now handle billions of data points and millions of transactions per second on the cloud. Both the quantities and the speed are mind-blowing. People argue that it can be used to eliminate poverty, promote inclusion, transform banking, facilitate business, and so on. But the main point, for me, is that it can now comfortably handle enough information quickly enough to enable the global scaling of small but beautiful ideas.A network of networks
We are born (without choice) to live a life on this planet. According to Karinthy and following a LinkedIn kind of model, every human on the planet can be included in a gigantic network where the maximum degree of separation is six. (Note: If you want the same opt-in, opt-out foundational principle to scale across ALL levels, as suggested previously, then you would need to consider the pre-conception existence of spirits or souls with or without the idea of reincarnation. That is clearly beyond the scope of this text.)
So let’s imagine that we have a global network of relationships between every human on the planet. (And, please, this is not a control freak’s wet dream) Everyone is in, like it or not.Now let’s suppose that there are 60 people in Nottingham who know how to grow lettuces, 100 allotment holders and 250 people who want to help plant and care for the lettuces on the allotments. They form a community. They share a purpose. How is that represented? It is a smaller network. The opt-in/opt-out principle applies to all lesser networks. So there will be a myriad of smaller, different networks. Every person can be in a large number of networks according to interest. The communities overlap through shared members. Communities with shared purpose are connected by shared experience.
The lettuce community exists because there is an ongoing activity.When the activity stops…the community may dissolve. Or it may become dormant. Or it may transform into a tomato-growing community. Communities are also dynamic systems. The community is continually recreated through its ongoing actions and narratives.So we can imagine a dynamic network of networks, like a giant multidimensional spider’s web. Each network has a unique set of characteristics. Number of members, resources, history of narratives, needs, contributions. Communities continually regenerate their purpose through new participants, new narratives, and new acts of coordination.
So we have
• A global human trust graph provides the substrate—everyone is potentially connected through chains of relationships.
• On that substrate, purpose-driven communities continually emerge, overlap, merge, split, and dissolve.
• The coordination system doesn’t create these communities; it helps them find one another, coordinate, and learn from one another.
That seems like a “living system”. The permanent structure isn’t the communities themselves. It’s the capacity for communities to form, evolve, and interconnect around human needs.Bauwens has described how, since the 70s, nations no longer dominate. States (through international governance) and Capital (through global finance and corporations) are dominant. He says that, to re-establish social and economic balance, we need to build translocal systems that can scale to the same state and national levels. He describes two emerging concepts: the network nation and the network state. Civil society born of networks. He also redirects the pupose of AI; he says that it is for civilizational synthesis.
Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory describes human development as occurring within a series of nested environments, ranging from the immediate relationships of family and friends (the microsystem), through interactions between these environments (the mesosystem), to wider social institutions (the exosystem), cultural values (the macrosystem), and the dimension of change over time (the chronosystem). Although originally developed to explain human development, this nested perspective maps naturally onto a modern network-of-networks model of governance. Instead of viewing society as a rigid hierarchy, each level can be understood as a dynamic network connected to other networks. Individuals participate simultaneously in multiple overlapping communities, projects, professions, interest groups, and social relationships, each operating at different scales but interacting continuously. Governance therefore emerges not from a single central authority but from the coordination of these interconnected networks, where information, trust, needs, resources, and knowledge flow across ecological boundaries. It is a framework for understanding governance as a living, adaptive system in which local interactions give rise to coherent behaviour at progressively larger scales.
If you then make the nesting, unlabeled ecosystems into a circle with a continuous rather than discrete radial dimension based not just on physical size but, maybe, also or alternatively on other network characteristics, you have a perfect mental model of the network of networks domain. It avoids classification of networks and especially the kind of labeling that Bronfenbrenner had applied to his nested ecosystems. But, it will be important to keep the idea that this is an ecological model: Networks co-existing in a dynamic, interactive way in win-win relationships, possibly.
Activity and Actions
What is the key element of the networks? If we want to model a system of governance for human activity, then it is clear that the key element MUST be activity in the form of actions (or in Whitehead’s language – events – right, for now, let’s stick with ‘actions’).
Let’s see how everything else relates to activity.
• People perform actions.
• Needs motivate actions.
• Capacities enable actions.
• Resources support actions.
• Narratives describe actions.
• Trust is built through repeated actions.
• Communities emerge from recurring patterns of activity.
• Projects are organised collections of activity.
• Commonwealth is the accumulated and inherited knowledge created by positive actions.
That looks OK for now. The list includes all the other elements of the system and relates them to the key element.Logic
There are a number of questions related to the nature of the logic of such a coordination system and a number of a priori concepts.
Precept 1: Human judgement can decide things that computer logic can’t, in ways that computer logic can’t work. These include contextual understanding, creativity, practical wisdom, ethical reasoning and the ability to interpret meaning from narratives.
Precept 2: In this coordination case, AI, or just IT, is a tool to enable the coordination of human activity. It may collect, organise, retrieve and analyse information, identify patterns and present alternative courses of action. It is not expected to make any decisions. All decisions that result in activity must be taken by humans.
Precept 3: Although the objective might be to optimize an activity, all viable alternatives must be presented. The purpose of the coordination system is not to determine the optimum decision but to maximise the quality of human deliberation.Quantitative vs qualitative
Boolean logic and Bayesian reasoning, object based programming all distil to 0-1 logic. and even programming languages like Logo and Lisp, and AI LLMs run on digital machines. They are of a quantitative nature. The issue is that all current computing is fundamentally algorithmic. There is a fundamental limitation in expecting quantitative algorithmic methods to determine human decisions based on qualitative narratives.
Narratives carry additional meaning through context, metaphor, ambiguity, history, intention, culture and relationships. Humans can handle this, computers can’t.Aristotle
“Aristotle…Just … lacked AI tools to instantiate reconstruction at scale and low cost.” Martin Geddes.
Aristotle was trying to describe the human capacity mentioned above. First, he differentiated it from deductive and inductive logic. Besides deduction (syllogistic reasoning) and induction (generalising from observations), he argued for a faculty he called nous (νοῦς), often translated as intellect, understanding, or sometimes intuition. His definition was somehow prior knowledge of first principles. He went on to define another word: phronesis (practical wisdom), the ability to discern the right action in the particular circumstances. Logic can always help but practical wisdom is irreducible. In simple Aristotelean terms, nous might be knowing and understanding the rules of the game and phronesis is the experience of playing the game many times. Together, they are human and not machine ways of thinking.
This implies the first two precepts.
The question “How does a coordination system move from foundational principles to wise action when logic alone cannot determine what to do?” is a frequent philosophical conundrum. Hume suggested it must involve sentiments as well as reason. Polanyi distinguished tacit knowledge from explicit knowledge—we know more than we can articulate. (How many times have I heard my students of English say ‘I can understand more than I can say’? LOL.)
Then we have a choice – do we try to program the IT kernel to emulate human qualities or do we build a firewall that does not allow any digital tech decision making, leaving it all to be decided outside via the human interface.
If a coordination system cannot rely solely on rules or deduction, what human capacities must it cultivate in its participants so that sound coordination emerges naturally?
Here are some human capacities we would need to include, if we wish and if we can.
1. Perception – seeing what is actually happening.
2. Recognition – perceiving patterns and relationships.
3. Empathy – understanding the needs and perspectives of others.
4. Imagination – envisioning possibilities that do not yet exist.
5. Judgement – choosing appropriately in a particular context.
It seems easier and better that we should develop them ourselves rather than program them into the digital system.Meaning
The digital system should not be a reasoning engine at all, in the classical AI sense. Perhaps, better, it should be an interpretation engine.
Suppose your database contains narratives such as:
Tim repaired Roger’s roof.
Roger later helped Maria harvest oranges.
Maria taught João English.
These are not propositions.
They are actions (events).
A conventional AI system immediately wants to reduce them to
trust(Tim)=0.91
reputation(Roger)=74
Exactly what we don’t want.
Narratives preserve the richness of the actions themselves.
The question then becomes “How can a system coordinate without collapsing stories into scores?”
Narrative: Roger repaired Mary’s pump.
Narrative: Mary recommends Roger.
Narrative: John observed Roger repairing pumps three times.
The system never creates a trust score.
When someone asks, “Who should repair my pump?”, the system traverses narratives.
It explains: “Mary recommends Roger because he repaired her pump.”
Case-based reasoning will ask “Have we seen something like this before?” Humans do this constantly. When someone asks for a plumber, we don’t calculate probabilities. We say
“John fixed ours last year. He arrived on time and charged fairly.” The action taken and the outcome are recorded in narrative form. The knowledge base increases and a feedback loop is triggered.
(Not my area but LISP is a programming language that handles lists. A key point is that the code itself is made of lists. The system can, through feedback, alter the code itself. This essentially is how the feedback loop is handled and the system updates dynamically not just the data base but also the system itself. Also see Terry Winegrad’s SHRDLU)Pattern recognition
Pattern recognition is not a form of logic.
Suppose the system retrieves twenty narratives that are relevant to a decision.
Irrelevant ones have been excluded. The system can organise them by e.g. relationship, time, trust path, or context. The IT system cannot understand the meaning of the narratives. Humans can and may see e.g.
“These people consistently fulfil commitments.”
“Whenever resources become scarce, this community spontaneously shares.”
“This project repeatedly fails when one organisation dominates.”
Aristotle’s nous may be exactly this recognition. Not mystical. Not irrational.
Rather, it is the faculty that recognises the universal within the particular.
You don’t deduce the pattern. You see it. Then you can use logic to examine what you’ve seen.
So, the IT system should aim to become exceptionally good at retrieving relevant narratives, discovering possible patterns, presenting several coherent interpretations, and explaining why each interpretation fits the evidence. The final judgement remains with the participants.Is nous the same as common sense? I can’t imagine that a big, burly sheep farmer in the Yorkshire Pennines, when he asks the new farmhand ” ‘An’t tha got no nouse, laddie?”, has been studying the thinking of Aristotle.
“Nouse” (or nous in many northern dialects) is indeed a common English dialect word meaning common sense, good judgement, or practical intelligence. If a Yorkshire farmer says, “An’t tha got no nouse, laddie?” he means, “Haven’t you got any common sense?”
For Aristotle, nous is the highest intellectual faculty. For the Yorkshire sheep farmer, nouse means something more like practical judgement, seeing what’s obvious, not doing daft things, understanding how the world works, or all of these. Suppose the new farmhand leaves the gate open. The farmer doesn’t think “The lad has failed to apply deductive logic.” He thinks “He hasn’t got any nouse.” Because good farming depends on recognising patterns: Sheep always look for an escape; Gates should always be shut ; Rain changes the ground; Ewes behave differently near lambing. In Yorkshire, none of this is learned by formal logic. It’s accumulated experience becoming practical judgement. (In fact, the Yorkshire meaning is closer to Aristotle’s phronesis (practical wisdom) than to nous itself.)Aristotle’s nous is a faculty of the knower. It is the capacity by which a person apprehends underlying principles or patterns. The emphasis is on the human’s ability to recognise.
Jung suggests that humans have access to a collective unconsciousness, from which conscious ideas can emerge, an archetypal pattern, via symbols, in the mind of an individual.
Sheldrake’s morphic fields are proposed to be properties of nature. Patterns in nature become easier to repeat because of morphic resonance from previous similar patterns. The emphasis is on patterns existing “out there,” not simply in the observer’s mind.
Aristotle’s nous could be thought of as the human capacity to become sensitive to those fields.
The narrative database in the proposed coordination system becomes a kind of collective memory. When a new need arises, the system retrieves similar past narratives. In effect, the community acquires something analogous to morphic resonance—not because there is an external field, but because past experience influences present action through preserved narratives.The day before yesterday evening, I got a phone call from a neighbour. The question was “Did I know somebody who could look at the control panel for their semi-artesian well because the pump was switching on and off and not pumping water into the water tank efficiently?” Naturally, I have a couple of calling cards of professionals who offer this kind of assistance. I have had a semiartesian well for forty years and it has had its moments. A couple of questions narrowed down the problem. It sounded like the contactor switch. But I still couldn’t offer any practical help until the following day. I passed on the phone numbers. Last night, my daughter told me they had installed a new pump. probably an expensive and possibly unnecessary solution.
Let’s see what this story illustrates.
What didn’t happen: The neighbour didn’t ask
“Who has the highest rating?” or “What’s the probability that this pump has failed?”
Instead, they asked: “Do you know somebody?”
That is a request for narrative knowledge embedded in a social network.
I’ve owned a semi-artesian well for forty years, I’ve experienced several different failures, I’ve learned which local professionals are reliable and I have their phone numbers. I then recognised a familiar pattern from a couple of diagnostic questions.
The IT coordination system can retrieve and report the narratives related to this information and related narratives. It could then analyse quantitatively the relevant information
Interestingly, my reasoning was almost entirely qualitative.
Intermittent switching…Pump not filling the tank…I’ve seen this before…It sounds more like a contactor than a failed pump. I remember the guy who replaced the part, his name, the company name and I had his phone number recorded. It was a long time ago.So, for the coordination system, if someone enters a narrative:”Our well pump repeatedly switches on and off but doesn’t fill the storage tank.” The system could retrieve narratives like: “Failed contactor replaced.”; “Pressure switch stuck.”; “Dry-running protection activated.”;”Pump impeller worn.”;”Pump actually failed.”
It could also retrieve: people who have solved similar problems; local electricians familiar with wells; neighbouring communities with similar equipment.
It might even present something like: Similar situations found: 14 involved contactors. 9 involved pressure switches. 3 required pump replacement.
Crucially, what it cannot say is “The probability is 54% that your contactor has failed.”
Instead, it would present relevant experience, through narrative, that allows the human to say, “Let’s test the contactor before replacing the pump.”Creativity
One human characteristic that computer logic can’t imitate is creativity. Creativity is one characteristic of human activity. A left-brained, 20th Century, reductionist, scientific, logical male (me) needs to know how creativity fits into our human coordination system. I might ask “Where does a creative insight come from?”
Graham Wallas described four stages of creativity: Preparation; Incubation; Illumination (“Aha!” – The Eureka Moment); and Verification.
Take Newton. When the apple fell off the tree and went down to the ground, the apple didn’t cause gravity to be discovered. It triggered a reorganisation of everything Newton already knew. The interesting part is the Illumination moment. Koestler argued that creativity often occurs when two previously unrelated “matrices of thought” are brought together. Those juxtapositions become fertile ground for insight and creativity.
The coordination system does not create knowledge or make decisions. It identifies previously unrecognised relationships among narratives and presents them in ways that increase the opportunity for human creativity, insight and informed judgement.Balance
Last but not least, the system must be balanced and designed to maintain that stability. Equilibrium may become static. Remember that balance is active and dynamic. Living ecosystems are rarely in equilibrium. Instead they exhibit what ecologists sometimes call dynamic equilibrium or dynamic stability. Everything is changing. Individuals come and go. Resources flow. Yet the system remains healthy. The coordination system must be dynamic but stable. It should be continuously adapting to maintain its balance.4 Conclusion
Money is not the root of all evil. The love for money is the root of all evil.
Money and power lead to conflict and violence.
Humans beings are sovereign individuals.
Human beings are interdependent.
Human nature is collaborative and creative.
Human activity creates wealth.
Wealth accumulates over time.
Wealth belongs to everybody. It is our commonwealth.
Commonwealth is inherited by humanity as a whole.
Commonwealth must be stewarded for thepresent and future generations.
Human activity can be coordinated through relationships, matching needs, contributions and resources, increasing trust and accumulating a history of knowledge. Proxy values are not essential and may be unnecessary.
Digital technology can now handle a large, complex, dynamic system to coordinate human activity across all scales. IT (or AI) is not capable of making the necessary decisions. That is a human capability. In other words, IT can form the kernel but the human interface is critical. IT can assist human decision-making but it cannot replace human judgement, responsibility and wisdom.
The Earth provides abundant natural resources. With responsible stewardship and effective coordination, there is sufficient material wealth for every person to live with dignity and security.
The challenge facing humanity is no longer primarily one of production but one of coordination.And here is one final thought. What if source has already created a universal coordination system? And it is just how we humans understand the system and how we play the game of life where the problems lie. If so, the challenge is not to invent a new system but to discover how it works, learn to participate in it more fully and align our relationships with it.
On receipt of this document, I responded with a couple of points that probably warrant further examination/discussion. I mentioned these to Claude to contextualise them in the light of all our Work to date:
On your note to Tim — I think you’re right and it’s not nitpicking. “Money is not the root of all evil, the love of money is” is the received wisdom, but it papers over the mechanism. Money-as-proxy is what makes the love of money possible at scale and impersonally — you can love money in a way you can’t love a favour owed to a specific neighbour, because the proxy strips out the relationship and leaves only the abstraction to be accumulated. So the usury/proxy-value critique you’ve been building says something sharper than the biblical version: it’s not a moral failing (love) grafted onto a neutral tool (money), it’s that the tool itself manufactures the conditions for that failing to become systemic rather than personal. Worth a short piece on its own terms at some point — the received aphorism versus the structural claim.
The Fear/Love line is the better insight of the two, though, and probably shouldn’t stay in a WhatsApp message. Capital/Nation/State requires fear as infrastructure — you’ve made that point before about manufactured threats securing compliance — while what Tim’s describing (opt-in/opt-out, no compulsory authority, allocation without permanent privilege) only functions if people are moving toward each other rather than defending against each other. That’s a real structural distinction, not just a rhetorical flourish: fear-based systems need enforcement because withdrawal is treated as betrayal or loss; love/trust-based systems treat withdrawal as information and adapt. Tim’s own foundational principles document is arguably the mechanism, and the Fear/Love framing is the diagnosis of why System One can’t ever produce what he’s describing no matter how it’s reformed. That might be worth its own short piece too — possibly the “sequencing” companion to the money-as-root-of-evil one, since both are cases where the popular framing quietly protects the very structure it appears to critique.