Definition
Vitality, Resilience, and Choice are the three foundational design principles for life-affirming civilization, serving as a comprehensive rubric for assessing whether interventions contribute to a fundamentally more adaptive, equitable, and life-affirming world.
The Three Principles
Vitality
The interconnected levels of well-being and quality of life for individuals, communities, and ecologies.
Vitality reorients our goal from extractive growth to holistic flourishing. It requires:
- Moving beyond narrow cost-benefit analyses
- Adopting holistic health indicators as primary metrics
- Aligning governance purpose with the flourishing of life
- Creating systems where rational self-interest becomes intrinsically aligned with collective well-being
Resilience
Anti-fragile systems that can adapt to shock and avoid catastrophic failure.
Resilience requires:
- Polycentric governance: Multiple, overlapping centers of decision-making
- Distributed networks: Avoiding single points of failure
- Self-correcting feedback loops: Systems that can detect and correct their own dysfunction
- Anti-rivalrous coordination: Mechanisms for actors to escape multi-polar traps
Choice
Sovereign agency ensuring meaningful participation and self-determination.
Choice enshrines:
- Sovereign agency: Individuals as ultimate arbiters of their own information and decisions
- Economic pluralism: Diverse economic models rather than monopolistic frameworks
- Data self-custody: Control over personal information and digital identity
- Participatory democracy: Direct agency in regulatory and governance processes
Application Framework
These principles serve as criteria for evaluating solutions to systemic problems:
Regulatory Capture Solutions
- Resilience: Polycentric governance, “extitutions” (external, open, participatory organizations)
- Choice: Self-correcting feedback loops (citizen assemblies, participatory budgeting)
- Vitality: Outcomes aligned with holistic well-being
Misaligned Incentives Solutions
- Vitality: Prosocial incentives that reward positive externalities
- Resilience: Aligned incentives where cooperation becomes the dominant strategy
- Choice: Economic pluralism enabling diverse value systems
Disinformation Solutions
- Resilience: Decentralized sensemaking infrastructure
- Choice: Data sovereignty and informational self-determination
- Vitality: Optimizing for coherence and collective intelligence
Mass Surveillance Solutions
- Choice: Sovereign agency and data self-custody
- Resilience: Privacy-preserving technologies by design
- Vitality: A civic culture that values freedom of thought
Economic Centralization Solutions
- Resilience: Polycentric and cosmo-local economies
- Vitality: Revitalization of the commons via open protocols
- Choice: Diverse and interoperable economic models
References
- Third Attractor - The desired future state these principles enable
- meta-crisis - The systemic dysfunction these principles address
- Systemic Problem Analysis - Application of principles to specific problems
- Web3 and the Generative Dynamics of the Metacrisis v01 - Web3 technologies as enablers
- Call Transcript - Discussion of design principles
Related Concepts
- Polycentric_Governance - Resilience principle in practice
- Cosmo_localism - Scale-appropriate coordination
- self-sovereign identity - Choice principle in digital systems
- commons governance - Vitality principle in resource management
- Participatory_Democracy - Choice principle in governance