This is our introductory position paper – outlining our expectations:

For global order, for social order, and for narratives;

For collaboration, for innovation, and for mechanisms.

Honoring the Old Order

The thinking espoused by PYRAMID has brought us from the Stone Age to the present, and it’s right that we should pay our respects even as we craft a new order for the world and innovate new paths for humanity. While the thinking that brought us here can’t guide us in our next steps, we must recognize that doesn’t make it wrong.

Their thinking has delivered great successes:

  • from fragile tribes to 8 billion humans dominating the globe!
  • from crude stone tools to wonders of circuit, medicine, and machine barely dreamed of!

Even as the sun sets on their way, we give thanks and acknowledge we are forever in their debt.

Framing the New Order

But what got us here won’t get us there, to the next stage of human flourishing.

We must acknowledge that humanity is embarking on a new phase of its journey – that we need new ideas to guide our socities and to order our lives. We must implement new systems that can work at the scale and sophistication of the modern world. Many of us struggle under the inability of previous methods to adapt to the complexity we face, and worse, that our lives are arbitrarily destroyed by attempts to manage them. The methods of PYRAMID cannot cope with this evolution and growth in humanity because they are fundamentally reductive in their approach, and require that humans fit within their management model. That optimization methodology has produced substantial results, but it has reached its limitations – because the “top of the pyramid” can no longer lead successfully.

We must replace PYRAMID with TREE.

Tenets

We put forward three tenets to guide the development of this framework:

  • Human flourishing is a profound good and we must consistently strive for it.
  • Competition not conflict to resolve our differences.
  • Cooperation is the dominance strategy of tribes.

Human Flourishing

Happy people make healthy societies while distressed people make distressed societies. Flourishing is culturally dependent and why we advocate for consensus-based and multipolar solutions. Yet there are commonalities, across societies: food, family, health, etc.

Competition Over Conflict

We should strive to demonstrate the excellence of our views and avoid conflict as a show of dominance. That is not to say that all conflict must be avoided (eg, when attacked) but that it cannot become a tool of imposing order nor asserting dominance. We’ve all seen the tragic outcomes of such approaches. Further, demonstrating dominance through competition avoids many conflicts – and is the basis of hierarchy.

Cooperation is Dominant

We should build partnerships where our interests align: for better living, for improving technology, for advancing science, etc. Cooperation can complement competition and help avoid conflict.

Implementation

We’ll elaborate in upcoming articles these details more fully, but want to include some notes on implementation at a high level.

Social Implementation

We believe that we must organize into a branching, regionalized system; hence the name TREE. This would use a ceullar, regionalized architecture also known as multipolarity. This focus on independent cultural and political implementations allows for experiments, differences in style, and side-steps monocultural failures.

Technical Implementation

We believe that parallel to this political and societal change, we’ll see the development of AI at various scales that can aggregate group opinions and utilize data-driven narratives. This will provide a scaffold for the political structure to align with the complexity of the real world rather than relying on inappropriate simplifications and coarse tools. Further, as quantum computing becomes coupled with AI, the fusion tree of qAI can match this cellular structure; hence the name TREE.

Closing Remarks

Our task as leaders is to lift our branches and our leaves to the Sun, that they may bear fruit. That is our duty and our offering.

- ZMGS

Minister of the Tree