Foundations

The foundations of Counity (“Foundations”) are based on the following ideas.

Basic Purpose: Basic purpose of cooperative community (“Counity”) is understanding and influencing the world that is complex, uncertain, and changing (together “CUC”) to achieve maximum sustainable happiness of the community.

Influence Principles: Principles that should be followed by the community to effectively understand and influence the CUC world.

Happiness Principles: Principles that explain why and how maximum sustainable happiness of the community should be searched.

Implied Principles: Important principles that are implied by Influence Principles and Happiness Principles.

Failing Principles: Principles that fail to adhere to Influence Principles, Happiness Principles, and Implied Principles (together “Principles”).

Foundational Institutions: Social order should manage the community to effectively achieve Basic Purpose. Foundational institutions of the social order ensure the adherence to Principles. Foundations include work-in-progress list of Foundational Institutions, which are assigned to the dominating Principle even if they relate to multiple Principles.

Institution Failures: Examples of failure of adherence to Foundational Institutions and its negative consequences demonstrating arguments for establishing Foundational Institutions.

Influence principles

1 Openness

Exploration and discussion of any matter is allowed and supported.

Implied Principles

Freedom of opinion and expression

Failing Principles

Ideologies (personal, social, political, religious, etc.) restricting exploration or discussion of certain matters.

Foundational Institutions

Public questioning: The right of each community member to request any public-relevant knowing and, through a court process, to question any public-relevant action. Restriction of the right may be subject to only rare exemptions if these are in extraordinary public interest.

2 Truthfulness

Knowing must be verified and truth to be acknowledged.

Implied Principles

• Data-driven
• Evidence-based
• Competency
• Transparency
• Sincerity

Failing Principles

• Lies
• Information disorders (misinformation, disinformation, malinformation)
• Manipulation
• Populism
• Political correctness
• Incompetency

Foundational Institutions

Data collection: Ubiquitous and continual collection of personal, organizational, public, and natural data for analyses required for efficient management of private and public matters.

Compliance check: Ubiquitous and continual evaluation of compliance of each community member and each organization with Principles.

Public log: Publicly accessable ubiquitous and continual collection of public-relevant actions and statements to keep a public record and to check compliance.

Expert institutions: Expert institutions to manage public policies, including law and its execution. Regular eligibility and voting procedures to select the leaders of these institutions based on professional competency of the candidates, complemented by Public log, Compliance check and Public questioning. Expert institutions, including their law making and execution, to be coordinated by government, which is a coordination expert institution.

Court: Institution for judging of serious cases of non-compliance with law and performance of Public questioning.

Institution Failures

Data collection failure: Insufficient collection of personal, organizational, and natural data makes impossible to solve efficiently many economic, health, security, environmental, and other problems.

Compliance check failure: Weak enforcement of law, both in private (e. g. breach of contracts) and public area (e. g. incompetent decision making and corruption, creation of information disorders), results into weak attainment of the aims set by the society.

Compliance check failure: Media often used by its owners, be it private or state, to manipulate people in the interest of the owners.

Expert institutions failure: Due to limited human intellect and abilities humans are not competent to thoroughly understand and influence CUC world. Therefore, social orders relying to a large extent on decisionmaking of general population, such as general political elections used in representative democracy or authoritarian systems or direct voting used in direct democracy, do not provide effective system for thorough understanding and influencing of CUC world and sustainable maximization of happiness of the society. These social orders are very well known for multiple and massive defects listed in Failing principles. Contrary to this, a social order based on coordinated decisionmaking of expert institutions, employing the knowledge and skill of experts in particular areas of CUC world, provides effective system for thorough uderstanding and influencing of CUC world and sustainable maximization of happiness of the society.

Expert institutions failure: General political elections often fail to select the most competent representatives for governance of the society due to voters’ insufficiet intellect and knowledge to choose the most competent representatives and due to private interests of the politicians and political parties conficting with public interests. Governance system based on politicians and general elections should be replaced by expert institutions with regular eligibility and voting procedures based on professional competency of the candidates, complemented by public log, compliance check and public questioning.

Expert institutions failure: Instead of competent representatives, authoritarian and populist leaders and their loyal followers are often elected in general political elections. These leaders manipulate voters, typically through simplistic and fear-creating communication, to get elected and concentrate power and wealth. Furter, these leaders are incapable or unwilling to admit and resolve real problems of the society.

Expert institutions failure: Political parties, both competing and monopolistic, create an environment that prioritizes private interest of its leaders and other party members that are in conflict with the public interests and that suppresses morality, expertise, and performance.

Expert institutions failure: Competing political parties undertake specific decisions and policies in the short-term interest of a particular party and its voters instead of decisions and policies in the long-term interest of the society. For this reason and for marketing reason the competing political parties divide and radicalize the society instead of unifying and reconciling the society. Competition of political parties often results in extreme decisions of dominating parties on one hand or a lack of ability to perform any action in situation of parties endlessly fighting each other on the other hand.

Expert institutions failure: There are multiple internal flaws in general political elections such as limited voters participation, vote manipulation, problematic procedures for coversion of votes to political representation, etc.

Expert institutions failure: Political backstops, meant as the last resort corrections of major political failures, such as general referendums or social revolutions, usually result in even bigger failures because of the flaws of general population decisionmaking mentioned above. Famous examples are 20th century series of referendums in Nazi Germany and Great October Socialist Revolution in Russia, which transformed these countries into totalitarian states causing multi-million killings in global and local population, respectively. In both cases, lies, manipulation, populism, and incompetency of the population were used within political power play.

3 Wholeness

Totality and interconnection of the world to be considered.

Implied Principles

• Long-term considerations
• Wide-space considerations
• Considerations of interests of different social groups (for example, public interests, minorities rights) and non-human life (for example, animal rights)
• Environmental considerations
• Opportunity and risk management

Failing Principles

• Short-termism
• Localism
• Particular interests (for example, private interests)
• Environmental damage
• Opportunity and risk mismanagement

Institution Failures

Expert institutions failure: Extensive real and financial costs of risk mismanagement such as impacts of global warming, pollution, pandemics, and demografic mismanagement.

4 Diversification

Alternative explorations to be performed.

Implied Principles

• Justified alternative explorations to be developed, operated, and evaluated on a certain scale to keep open options in complex, uncertain, and changing world.

Failing Principles

• Lack of options

5 Adaptation

Permanent reconsideration and adjustment of everything.

Implied Principles

• Permanent challenge of established orders
• Fast and extensive adoption of new knowledge and technologies

Failing Principles

• Obsolete
• Underdevelopment
• Conservatism

Foundational Institutions

Virtualization: Ubiquitous and extensive use of virtual models of physical objects and processes (digital twins) to collect, analyze and represent data to effectively manage these objects and processes. To be applied, for example, to virtual identity of Counity members and virtual economy of Counity businesses and organizations.

6 Efficiency

Maximization of utilization of available resources.

Implied Principles

• Modesty
• Sharing

Failing Principles

• Wastefulness
• Unavailability

7 Effectiveness

Maximization of the ability to accomplish the aims.

Implied Principles

• Focused utilization of assests and knowledge
• Comprehensive management
• Cooperation
• Coordination
• Information and logistics connectedness
• Appropriate set up of private and public rights

Failing Principles

• Underperformance
• Mismanagement
• Missing coordination
• Imbalance
• Inaction

Foundational Institutions

Common social ground: Social unity to be maintained through common social ground such as sharing common language, values, and information base, ensuring equality, and complying with law and Counity principles to prevent disintegration of the society leading to ineffectiveness.

Economy: Multi-objective economic optimization, meaning multi-objective optimization of resource allocation, in line with the Principles through the following principles:

1 Cooperating economy:

Fast and extensive continual transfer of resources (knowledge, employees, assets, etc.) ensuring efficient and effective utilization of resources.

Utilization of humans based on their best abilities and in compliance with Balanced life.

Equal monetary remuneration of humans, adjusted (increased or reduced) in proportion to their lifecycle needs (for example, number of economicaly dependent children), satisfaction of compliance, and level of effort (for example, voluntarily reduced working hours. This would not be the case of unvoluntarily reduction of working hours induced, for example, by health or family conditions). Unequal monetary remunaration in proportion to unequal distribution of endowment of abilities, luck, and negotiation power among humans is unearned and often causes humans to excessively focus on property and power and, thereby, leads them to unbalanced life and rivalries with multiple negative effects on themselves, employing organizations, and society (for the negative effects see examples of failure of adherence to Happiness Principles). The combination of Balanced life, utilization of best abilities, equal monetary renumeration, and compliance checks will support humans to achieve the overall best work satisfaction and performance. Humans with biggest endowment of abilities will be rewarded with, and at the same time will have biggest responsibility of, biggest participation on the management of the community.

Fast and wide utilization of best solutions. Centralization applied if effective.

Appropriate diversification through operation of alternative teams and undertaking of alternative solutions. Utilization of market for marketable products and services.

Public ownership of resources and organizations to eliminate conflicts of interest of private owners and absorp uneven shocks when the multi-objective economic optimization in line with the Principles is carried out. Consequently, private ownership to be limited to personal belongings.

Set up, funding and supervision of teams (incl. startups) through investment committees and funds (similar processes to those of venture capital and private equity in capitalism).

2 Sharing economy: Extensive use of asset and knowledge sharing.

3 Adaptive economy: Fast and extensive adoption of data and new knowledge and technologies.

4 Environmental economy: Environmentaly considerate, circular, emission-free.

Public services: Multiple public services provided to members of the community free-of-charge in maximum quality to achieve Basic Purpose, especially Effectiveness and Balanced Life. The range and quality of public services, the public service standard, to be determined by the economic and knowledge performance of the community and prioritization within the allocation of limited resources of the community. Public service standard to include, for example, personal belongings, accommodation, transportation, education, health service, leisure service, and counseling.

Connectedness: Virtual and physical infrastructure for extensive information and logistics connectednes among the members of society, organizations, and public administration.

Best practice: Ubiquitous and continual development, reconsideration, and publication of best practices for individuals, organizations, and society. Balanced life guide being an application of Best practice as practical guide to Balanced life containing personal rules based on Principles.

Institution Failures

Common social ground failure: Missing common social ground and, consequently, missing social unity within states and global society lead to multiple social, economical, and political problems of and inablity to effeciently solve these problems by these states and global society.

Economy failure: Short-term private profit maximization as the dominating objective in capitalism largely disregards other multiple objectives of the society and results into suboptimal economic and non-economic actions at the level of the society.

Economy failure: Multiple conflicts between private and public interests and limited coordination in economies with predominantly privately owned resources (such as Western capitalism) or authoritarian management (such as Chinese socialist market economy).

Economy failure: Advertising is one of fundamental business models used in current economies yet it usually involves manipulation, irrelevancy, time ineffeciency, promotion of bad products, distraction with possible multiple negative effects.

Connectedness failure: Underdeveloped virtual and physical infrastructure for information and logistics connectednes between the members of society and public administration limits implementation of public policies and decisions and interactions between the members and administration, in both normal and crisis times. This has similar effects in business context.

Happiness Principles

8 Community happiness

Maximum sustainable happiness of the community to be searched as humans live, produce, and thrive only in society as the intellect and abilities of the society to understand and influence the complexity, uncertainty, and changes of the world are fundamentally higher than those of any individual human.

9 Individual happiness

Maximum sustainable happiness of the community to be achieved in form of maximum sustainable sum of happiness of the individual members of the community as the community is created by its individual members.

Implied Principles

• Excessive focus on happiness of a member or a member group of the community harms happiness of the other members of the community.

Failing Principles

• Particular interests
• Conflict of interest
• Corruption
• Social conflicts

Institution failures

Compliance failure: Rivalries, whether personal, organizational, political, economical, social, religious, or any other, promoting happiness of certain individuals or groups at the expense of the others result into spite and fear among the individuals and groups, and thus make it difficult to find common ground for solidarity and unity, leading to unhappiness and possibly to disintegration of the groups and, at the highest level, of the society. Most of the past and current social orders are abundant with rivalries in multiple forms.

10 Balanced life

Happiness of the members of the community to be searched in a balanced life of the members in which different components of the life are in the right amount and proportion as happiness of the humans is created by their balanced life.

Implied Principles

• Excessive focus on any of the life components (often on comfort, property, power) harms other life components (often physical health, mental health, social relationships, environmental conditions) and, as a result, harms the happiness of the individuals and functioning of the society.
• Excessive focus on present happiness harms future happiness and on the contrary.

Failing Principles

• Health damage
• Organizational damage
• Social damage
• Environmental damage

Foundational Institutions

Balanced life monitor: Evaluation of personal compliance with Balanced life guide based on personal data from Data collection.

Counseling: Personal and family counsellors providing guidance in implementation of best practice in the area of personal and family Balanced life and Common social ground. Important part of counseling to be guidance in nutrition, physical activities, personal and family and work relationships, raising children, personal and family economy.

Institution Failures

Counseling failure: Humans are usually not raised and guided to Balanced life, which results in their unbalanced life, often full of desire for comfort, property, and power, and satisfaction of their individual interests and happiness and disregard for others’ interests and happiness. Mental state of such humans tends to be driven by fear, spite, greed, and self-interest. Highly mentally unbalanced humans often prevail in the interactions with other humans, whether in personal, organizational, or any other social life, and harm the interests and happiness of other humans and society. They are exceptionally motivated to get to leading, superior, or advantageous positions to promote their private interests and happiness at the expense of the others. Therefore, humans with Balanced lives are required for a well functioning relationships, families, organizations, and society.

Compliance failure: Unbalanced humans often seek to be powerful, intelligent, and successful to use these attributes to expand their comfort, property, and power instead of using these attributes to take care of and protect the society, which is a precondition for the comfort, property, and power of all humans.

Counseling failure: Excessive desire for comfort, property and power in rich countries results into extremely low birth rates leading to failure to reproduce domestic population. To compensate potentially devastating decline of domestic population extensive migration of foreign population is carried out. Since the extensive migration is usually mismanaged multiple social problems arise.