Why do arguments in political debates so often bounce off to no effect? Why does one person perceive a call for freedom as liberating, while another sees it as a threat to social peace? The answer lies in a fundamental, neurologically anchored difference in human social behavior: The tension between the drive for autonomy and the drive for harmony.
This book will show that these two fundamental drives – the urge for personal sovereignty and the urge for collective harmony – are the hidden driving force behind our political convictions, our reactions to social pressure, and ultimately the structure of our entire society.
Medical and Psychological Foundations
Both drives are strategies for coping with the same stressor: external demands. The drive for autonomy responds with a flight into sovereignty, the drive for harmony with a flight into conformity.
Basic Needs and Motivation
The drive for autonomy strives for sovereignty, authenticity, and resonance. The drive for harmony prioritizes harmony, structure, validation, and belonging.
Political and Societal Affinities
This translates into opposing political homes: libertarian, decentralist movements on one side, statist and collectivist approaches on the other.
Reaction to Pressure and Threat Scenarios
Under stress, the drive for autonomy escalates into defensive aggression, the drive for harmony into forced conformity. In a state of maximum overwhelm, their reactions converge into undifferentiated defense. Under pressure, these needs lead to extreme positions, from anarcho-capitalism and antinatalism (isolation) to fiducialism and collectivism (integration).
The Great Societal Reversal
Modern society institutionalizes the pathological drive for harmony and pathologizes the healthy drive for autonomy – a fundamental reversal that explains systemic fragility.
Technology as an Amplifier and Tool for Liberation
Technology amplifies both sides: decentralized tools empower autonomy, centralized platforms instrumentalize the drive for harmony.
The Concept of Voluntary Hierarchy
Fiducialism resolves the contradiction through voluntary hierarchies based on the recognition of competence, as opposed to forced hierarchies through ideological pressure.
The Immune System Metaphor of Societal Health
The drive for autonomy functions as the adaptive immune system (innovation, defense), the drive for harmony as the innate immune system (stability, continuity). Their balance is crucial.
The Fiducialist Equilibrium
The fiducialist model creates an equilibrium that unites structural reliability for the drive for harmony with maximum freedom for the drive for autonomy.
Summary
Only by restoring a healthy balance between these poles can a resilient social order emerge. The fiducialist model transforms the fundamental conflict from a destructive opposition into a productive tension.
Medical and Psychological Foundations
The Social Engagement System (SES): The Source of Social Reactivity
The central neurophysiological mechanism that determines how we handle social demands is the Social Engagement System (SES). This system, encompassing the brainstem, limbic system, and the ventral vagus nerve, functions as a biological interface for interpersonal interaction. It controls the fine-tuning of our social signals (facial expression, tone of voice) and, above all, our response to the expectations of others.
The basal activity of the SES varies fundamentally from person to person and determines the individual's sensitivity to social pressure:
- High SES activity: Leads to a highly sensitive perception of social expectations. Even minor demands can trigger strong physiological stress. This high reactivity is the starting point for the most pronounced behavioral patterns.
- Medium SES activity: Enables a balanced, adaptive perception and response to social norms.
- Low SES activity: Leads to a fundamentally lower sensitivity to social expectations. External demands create little to no inner conflict or stress. This results in a passive, often unreflective assimilation to prevailing norms and forms the stabilizing social base layer - the mainstream.
Coping Strategies with High SES Activity: Autonomy and Harmony
When a highly active SES signals social pressure as stress, individuals develop two fundamentally different neurological coping strategies. These strategies are the answer to the same source, but their orientation is opposite.
Drive for Harmony: The Strategy of Conformity
- Basic Principle: The flight into identification with the expectation. Stress is regulated through active emotional investment in restoring harmony and group integration. This socially desirable strategy is often perceived as social competence.
- Core Characteristic: Intense urge to fulfill perceived expectations.
- Trigger: Social tensions or the possibility of disharmony.
- Neurological Basis: Hypervigilance towards social rejection.
Drive for Autonomy: The Strategy of Sovereignty
- Basic Principle: The flight from the stress-triggering social expectation into one's own independence. Stress is regulated by restoring control and self-determination.
- Core Characteristic: Automatic defense reaction against perceived pressure of expectation.
- Trigger: Unsolicited or non-negotiable demands.
- Neurological Basis: Innate resistance to externally imposed, non-intrinsically motivated demands.
Pathological Extremes and Natural Variation
These coping strategies exist on a spectrum. Their pathological extremes are described in the clinical context:
Pathological Demand Acceptance (PDAc)
The clinically less formalized, but observable extreme of the drive for harmony. Characterized by a pathological, compulsive fulfillment of expectations at any cost.
Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA)
The extreme expression of the drive for autonomy, often considered a subtype of the autism spectrum. Characterized by a pathological, all-encompassing avoidance of demands.
Beyond these pathological poles, however, the drive for autonomy and the drive for harmony are natural, neurodiverse expressions of human sociality. They describe the fundamental archetypal patterns of how people cope with the inevitable stress of social life.
The Prognostic Power of the Combined Model
Only the combination of the intensity of the reaction (SES activity) and the chosen strategy (Autonomy/Harmony) reveals the complete picture. It predicts whether an individual tends towards passive adaptation, moderate reform, or radical extremism – and thus explains the entire spectrum of political and societal behavior.
Basic Needs and Motivation
The neurological strategies of the drive for autonomy and drive for harmony described in the previous chapter manifest themselves in a fundamentally different hierarchy of psychological basic needs and motivations.
The different weighting of these needs results directly from the described coping strategies: While the drive for harmony seeks its satisfaction in external social confirmation, the drive for autonomy finds it in internal self-confirmation.
Drive for Harmony
- Harmony: Avoidance of conflicts and maintenance of social stability as top priority
- Structure: Clear hierarchical orders and predictable social rules
- Validation: External confirmation through fulfillment of social expectations and norms
- Belonging: Integration into existing social structures and traditional communities
Drive for Autonomy
- Sovereignty: Absolute decision-making authority over one's own actions and life plans
- Authenticity: Predictable, transparent relationships without hidden expectations or agendas
- Resonance: Recognition of the self-chosen identity and authentic values
- Regeneration: Undisturbed retreat spaces and control over the stimulus environment when overwhelmed
Political and Societal Affinities: The Three Poles
The political landscape cannot be understood on a simple left-right axis. Only the combination of sensitivity to social pressure (SES activity) and the underlying psychological need (Autonomy or Harmony) reveals the true matrix of political and societal attitudes. This model explains why the mainstream is so malleable and why the extremes, despite having opposing goals, resemble each other in their systemic opposition.
The Role of SES Activity
The Mainstream (Low SES Activity)
- Individuals with low SES activity experience little intrinsic stress from social expectations. Their political stance is reactive and passive.
- Political Home: The contemporary status quo, regardless of its substantive direction. They represent what is considered socially normal.
- Characteristic: Pragmatic adaptability, low ideological commitment. Stabilization of the system primarily through passive stability and mass inertia.
The Ideologues (High SES Activity)
- Individuals with high SES activity experience social pressure intensely. Their political stance is a direct, amplified reaction to this perceived stress – either through the drive for autonomy or the drive for harmony.
- Common Denominator: Fundamental dissatisfaction with the mainstream or establishment system. The urge to either deconstruct it (Autonomy) or replace it with another, more harmonious system (Harmony). Often anarchistic attitudes.
- Characteristic: Adherence to principles, low willingness to compromise, system-critical stance.
The Coping Strategies (with High SES Activity)
Drive for Harmony: The Striving for Collective Order
- Political Home: Socialist, collectivist, technocratic, and statist approaches.
- Extreme Expression: Anarcho-communism.
- Understanding of the State: The state is seen as an instrument for enforcing harmony, equality, and social justice. The goal is a strong, regulating, and redistributive institution.
- Economic Model: Welfare state systems, elements of planned economy, redistribution – all to eliminate conflict-generating inequality.
- Technology Affinity: Centralized platforms, digital identity systems, social credit systems – all instruments for measuring, steering, and ensuring collective conformity.
Drive for Autonomy: The Striving for Sovereignty
- Political Home: Libertarian, sovereigntist, decentralist, and anarcho-capitalist movements.
- Extreme Expression: Anarcho-capitalism.
- Understanding of the State: The state is considered the primary source of illegitimate social demands. The goal is its minimization or abolition in favor of minimal statism, private legal orders, and voluntarist models.
- Economic Model: Radical free markets, agorism, unrestricted private property orders.
- Technology Affinity: Decentralized technologies (Bitcoin, FOSS), privacy tools, opt-out systems – all instruments for restoring individual sovereignty.
The Three Poles: A Systematic Summary
From these insights, three poles emerge, resulting from the combination of SES activity and basic need:
Harmony Pole
Characterized by high SES activity & need for harmony. Reacts to pressure by striving for collective order and system replacement.
Mainstream Pole
Characterized by low SES activity. Low intrinsic reaction to social pressure, primary need is passive stability through adaptation.
Autonomy Pole
Characterized by high SES activity & need for autonomy. Reacts to pressure by striving for individual sovereignty and system deconstruction.
These three poles – Mainstream, Autonomy, and Harmony – span the entire political spectrum. Most people are not at the poles, but in the areas between them. These intermediate positions are populated by people with medium SES activity, who embody a mix of pragmatic adaptation and principled orientation.
From Mainstream to Harmony Pole
This area is dominated by positions that combine the need for stability and collective harmony. Democracy itself with its majority principle is a classic instrument of this area, as it resolves conflicts through systematized harmony. Further out are socialist and statist positions that demand a strong, redistributive state power to actively create material equality and social harmony.
From Mainstream to Autonomy Pole
This area is dominated by positions that combine the need for order and sovereignty. Here we find conservative and authoritarian attitudes. They reject the dissolution of the state but demand a strong, sovereign state that protects traditional values and defends against external and internal threats. Their goal is a hierarchical, ordered freedom for their own community.
The Psychological Chasm Between the Extremes
A direct connection between the extremes fails due to human psychology. A highly sensitive Social Engagement System (SES) cannot unite the contradictory basic needs for radical autonomy and radical harmony simultaneously in one person. This psychological incompatibility prevents stable political movements that want to fuse both principles. Therefore, political conflict necessarily runs along the two axes that lead from the mainstream to the respective poles.
Since the direct connection between the extreme poles is psychologically impossible, the political spectrum nevertheless appears linear – along the axis from the Harmony Pole through the Mainstream Pole to the Autonomy Pole. This spectrum from Harmony to Autonomy via the Mainstream correlates remarkably well with the typical left-right spectrum.
That this is not a straight line but one with a kink explains why the political spectrum is often perceived as a horseshoe. Although the endpoints represent substantive opposites, they share crucial characteristics – namely high SES activity and fundamental system opposition. In their methods (radical activism, establishment hostility) they therefore resemble each other more than the passive mainstream center.
The empty space between the extremes marks the deficit of a genuine synthetic vision – a form of society that realizes both individual sovereignty and organic communal spirit. Such a synthesis could theoretically serve everyone: The Autonomy Pole through voluntary structures and the Harmony Pole through genuine consensus. In such a system, the mainstream would find its natural place as a stabilizing, preserving force, instead of becoming a pawn of the extremes.
Currently, this center is unoccupied, because the mainstream with its low SES activity possesses neither the visionary power nor the pressure for such a synthesis. Instead of a conscious redefinition of the center, it dominates through passive adaptation to the prevailing cultural hegemony. A truly balanced society, however, requires that this empty space be actively filled by an ideology that transcends the opposites – which would transform the political spectrum from a bent horseshoe into a stable, continuous line.
This model thus maps not morality, but human nature in dealing with social stress – and shows the way to a potentially higher political synthesis.
Reaction to Pressure and Threat Scenarios
Under normal conditions, the drive for autonomy and the drive for harmony can coexist. However, under massive social pressure or existential threat, these basic needs escalate into their purest, often most destructive forms. This chapter examines these pathological turns and the political systems that emerge from them.
Drive for Harmony under Stress
- Survival Principle: Maintenance of harmony and social peace at any cost.
- Strategy: Subordination, self-sacrifice, forced conformity.
- Pathological Degeneration: Totalitarian submission to collective constraints to the point of self-annihilation.
- Extreme Form: Antinatalism or collective suicide as the ultimate avoidance of conflict potential. (Sieg Jäger as an archetypal example: He seeks the annihilation of his own people to end the eternal conflict with others and thus achieve ultimate harmony).
Drive for Autonomy under Stress
- Survival Principle: Autonomy and protection of allied persons have absolute priority.
- Strategy: Development of parallel structures, circumvention of the system, if necessary defensive aggression.
- Pathological Degeneration: Radical rejection of all authority to the point of annihilation of all forces perceived as threatening.
- Extreme Form: Total nationalism or isolationism, which perceives the whole world as a hostile environment. (Eren Jäger as an archetypal example: He tries to enforce absolute autonomy through total destruction of the external threat).
Convergence under Maximum Stress: When the Differences Collapse
In highly unstable environments with contradictory expectations, the reactions of both profiles converge:
- The drive for harmony suffers from the impossibility of satisfying all contradictory expectations simultaneously.
- The drive for autonomy suffers from the multiple pressures of different authorities.
- In this state of maximum overwhelm, the difference between "not being able to fulfill" (drive for harmony) and "not wanting to fulfill" (drive for autonomy) becomes practically irrelevant.
- Neurologically, the differentiating capacity of the prefrontal cortex collapses. The amygdala-driven stress response takes over leadership, causing the different coping strategies to merge into undifferentiated flight or fight reflexes beyond their original strategic orientation.
- Both experience the same physiological stress and respond with maximum defense – either through complete withdrawal or radical annihilation of the stress sources.
The Four Archetypal Poles of Political Organization
Under maximum pressure, the basic needs lead to clearly defined extreme positions. Isolation describes the strategy when the relationship to the environment is perceived as so threatening that only its complete dissolution seems to be the solution. Integration describes the opposite approach, to establish a stable order within the relationship.
The following table shows the four pure, archetypal endpoints:
| Harmony Strategy | Autonomy Strategy | |
|---|---|---|
| Isolation | Antinatalism | Anarcho-Capitalism |
| Integration | Collectivism | Fiducialism |
Antinatalism
Represents the ultimate consequence of striving for harmony through isolation: The elimination of all conflict potential by eliminating its source – life itself.
Anarcho-Capitalism
Represents the ultimate consequence of striving for autonomy through isolation: The abolition of all coercive systems in favor of radical individual sovereignty.
Collectivism
Represents the harmony-driven form of integration: The enforcement of order through the complete subordination and assimilation of the individual under the collective.
Fiducialism
Represents the autonomous form of integration: The construction of an order based solely on voluntary, trust-based relationships and intrinsically motivated cooperation.
These four positions mark the logical endpoints. Fiducialism deserves special attention, as it is not simply one position among others, but represents the strategic attempt to overcome the chasm between the poles through a higher synthesis – an order that, on an autonomous basis, authentically fulfills the harmony-needing desire for community.
The Great Societal Reversal
Modern society has carried out a fundamental reversal of natural social ordering principles: It institutionalizes the pathological drive for harmony and pathologizes the healthy drive for autonomy. This process explains the increasing fragility, lack of innovation, and societal tension of our time.
The Pathologization of the Healthy Drive for Autonomy
Simultaneously, the fundamental human need for self-determination and freedom is systematically suppressed and labeled as a dangerous deviation:
- Stigmatization: Healthy strivings for autonomy are stigmatized as "stubborn," "nonconformist," "selfish," or "antisocial."
- Systemic Oppression: Institutions punish autonomy through bureaucratic hurdles, social ostracism ("Cancel Culture"), and the withdrawal of resources.
- Psychiatrization: A possible underlying neurological disposition (PDA) is not seen as a natural variation, but as a disorder to be treated.
The Institutionalization of the Pathological Drive for Harmony
What was once a personal psychological predisposition has now become the dominant cultural and political imperative:
- Seizure of Power: The pathological drive for harmony has captured key positions in media, education, bureaucracy, and culture.
- Disguised as Virtue: It successfully disguises itself as a selfless striving for social justice, equality, and diversity, while in reality it is erecting a forced harmony.
- War on Nature: Organically evolved hierarchies (merit, competence, tradition, trust) and ontological realities are actively fought and denounced as unjust.
- Replacement by Ideology: In their place come artificial, ideological constructs (quotas, speech prohibitions) that enforce conformity.
The Consequences: Fragility and Decadence
This reversal has devastating consequences for society as a whole:
- Systemic Fragility: A society that prioritizes conflict avoidance above all else loses the ability to deal with genuine threats. It becomes soft, inflexible, and fragile.
- Loss of Resilience and Innovation: By suppressing the autonomous, sovereign, often nonconformist individual, society stifles its own source of resilience, creativity, and technological progress.
- Decadence: Society devotes its energy no longer to value creation, but to the neurotic micro-regulation of language, behavior, and interpersonal relationships – a sure sign of a late, decadent civilization.
This great reversal is no accident, but the direct result of the political hegemony of a particular psychological predisposition over all others. The path to a healthy society leads through the exposure of this reversal and the rehabilitation of the autonomous principle.
Technology as an Amplifier and Tool for Liberation
Technological development acts as a catalyst that not only serves the underlying psychological needs for autonomy and harmony but drives them to their logical conclusions. The mainstream acts here as a passive breeding ground and amplifier for the tech stacks of the active poles.
The Technology Stack of the Drive for Harmony
The pure drive for harmony strives for uniformity, predictability, and group-internal consensus. Its ideal-typical technology is federated systems – decentralized but standardized, with clear community boundaries and moderation tools.
- Federation instead of Centralization: Protocols like ActivityPub (Mastodon) or Matrix enable harmonious, moderated communities that are interoperable with each other. This allows for local harmony with global connectedness.
- Hijacked Harmony: In practice, this need is often hijacked by centralist forces. Centralized platforms imitate community but undermine organic harmony through opaque algorithms and top-down control.
- Behavioral Conditioning: Algorithmic scoring and social credit systems replace intrinsic morality with extrinsic coercion.
- Instrumentalized Control: Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) pervert the need for security into total financial surveillance.
Psychological Effect: Genuine federation satisfies the need for harmony through structured community. The hijacked stack manipulates it in favor of forced conformity.
The Tech Stack of the Mainstream
The mainstream (low SES activity) has no intrinsic tech stack. Its technology affinity is purely reactive and pragmatic. It passively adopts whatever is currently considered normal and offers the path of least resistance. Thereby it amplifies the currently dominant tech stack – currently that of the institutionalized drive for harmony – and gives it its systemic power through mass, uncritical adoption.
- Characteristics: Convenience, standardization, low entry barriers.
- Role: The mainstream is the critical mass factor. Its passive usage decides which tech stack becomes hegemonic.
The Technology Stack of the Drive for Autonomy
Autonomy strives for radical decentralization without coercive means – not just federation (which still allows moderation hierarchies), but genuine decentralization with maximum exit options and censorship resistance.
- Genuine Decentralization: Protocols like Nostr (no instances, only relays), Bitcoin (Proof-of-Work without masters), Freenet or IPFS enable sovereign participation without permission.
- Privacy Protection: Encryption, pseudonymity, Cash (or Bitcoin) create spaces beyond social control.
- Material Independence: 3D printing, local manufacturing, mesh networks reduce dependencies.
Psychological Effect: This stack satisfies the need for autonomy through absolute self-determination – not just within a system, but through the possibility to leave or ignore any system.
The Inevitable Conflict
The conflict is not simply fought between centralization and decentralization, but between:
- an alienated hybrid model (Centralization that hijacks harmony needs and instrumentalizes the mainstream)
- an authentic decentralization model (that satisfies autonomy needs)
The outcome of this technological struggle will decide whether the future is based on voluntary cooperation or forced conformity.
The Immune System Metaphor of Societal Health
A healthy society functions like a healthy organism. It needs different, complementary systems to ensure stability and adaptability. The immune system metaphor provides a perfect model to understand the role of the drive for autonomy and the drive for harmony.
The Drive for Harmony: The Innate Immune System
- Function: The drive for harmony acts as a homeostatic, stabilizing mechanism. It is the baseline mode of society, slow, generalized, and always active.
- Task: Maintains stability, continuity, and basic social peace. It preserves proven traditions, cultural patterns, and routines.
- Mode of Action: Like the innate immune system, it responds to all disturbances of homeostasis with a generalized inflammatory response (social pressure, conformity pressure) to protect the status quo.
- Strength & Weakness: Extremely robust and immediately available, but rigid and imprecise. It cannot distinguish between a genuine threat and a harmless innovation.
The Mainstream: The Body Tissue
- Function: The mainstream is not the immune system, but the body itself – the mass of cells (citizens), the organs (institutions), and the basic processes (economy, culture) that must be kept running.
- Role: It is the silent, passive substrate that must be protected. Its state of health is the result of the balanced work of both immune systems.
- Relation to the Immune System: The mainstream (body) produces the signals that alert the innate immune system (drive for harmony). It is also the battlefield on which the adaptive immune system (drive for autonomy) fights.
The Drive for Autonomy: The Adaptive Immune System
- Function: The drive for autonomy acts as a specialized, learnable defense and innovation mechanism. It is highly active, targeted, and activated when needed.
- Task: Identifies specific threats (corrupted authority, systemic misdevelopments, existential risks). Enables profound adaptation and evolutionary development.
- Mode of Action: Like the adaptive immune system, it develops targeted "antibodies" and "lymphocytes" (new ideas, technologies, countercultures, political movements) to combat pathogens.
- Strength & Weakness: Highly precise and adaptable, but slow to activate and prone to malfunctions (autoimmune reactions when it attacks healthy societal structures).
Disease Patterns of a Disrupted Balance
- Autoimmune Disease: The adaptive immune system (drive for autonomy) becomes pathological and attacks healthy societal structures (the mainstream/body). (Example: Radical system hostility that wants to destroy all traditions and institutions).
- Chronic Inflammatory Disease: The innate immune system (drive for harmony) is permanently overactive and stifles every innovation and necessary adaptation under a smothering conformity pressure. (Example: Overreaching political correctness, Cancel Culture, petrified bureaucracy).
- Immunodeficiency: Both systems are weak. The drive for harmony can no longer establish stability, the drive for autonomy can no longer defend against threats. The body (mainstream) becomes defenseless against pathogens (corruption, decadence, external threats). (Example: An apathetic, decadent late-stage society).
Health is therefore not a static state, but a dynamic balance between these two polar, yet essential forces.
The Concept of Voluntary Hierarchy
The preceding metaphor shows: A healthy society needs both stability (Harmony) and adaptability (Autonomy). The conventional collectivist approach tries to achieve this through forced equality and fails. Fiducialism solves this problem through the principle of voluntary hierarchy – the decisive alternative to forced equality or forced domination.
Forced/Artificial Hierarchy (The Collectivist Way)
- Maintenance: Is maintained through moral pressure, bureaucracy, sanctions, and systemic coercion.
- Purpose: Serves primarily the maintenance and propagation of an ideological project, not the solution of concrete problems.
- Leadership: Positions are filled by administrators of the ideology, bureaucrats, and conformists, not by the actually most capable.
- Structure: Rigid, inflexible, pyramidal structures that enforce conformity and stifle dissent.
- Effect: Promotes mediocrity, opportunistic adaptation, and fear. The individual feels like a controlled object.
- Result: Stagnation and fragility, as the system is held together by external pressure and collapses when coercion subsides.
Organic/Voluntary Hierarchy (The Fiducialist Way)
- Origin: Arises naturally through the voluntary recognition of competence, authority, and character (charisma in the original sense of the word).
- Source of Legitimacy: Authority is given to the leader from below (delegated), not taken or forced from above.
- Structure: Dynamic, adaptive networks and structures that can change and adapt when performance or trust changes.
- Basis: Based on voluntarily given personal trust, proven performance, and mutual respect.
- Effect: Promotes responsibility, initiative, and excellence. The individual feels like a sovereign part of a whole, not a cog in a machine.
- Result: Genuine community and high resilience, as the order is based on voluntary consent and not on forced submission.
The Fiducialist Equilibrium
If the immune system model is the diagnosis and voluntary hierarchy the operative principle, then the fiducialist equilibrium is the described target state – the consciously created framework to institutionalize the dynamic balance between stability and innovation.
Its ingenious approach is not a simple mixture, but a strategic synthesis on an autonomous basis. It recognizes that the greatest threat to autonomy is not the longing for harmony itself, but its violent suppression, which inevitably turns into collectivism.
The Mechanics of the Equilibrium
The equilibrium is created by fulfilling both basic needs in their authentic way:
- For the drive for autonomy: The framework offers maximum freedom, self-determination, and low-friction interaction in voluntary networks. It is a system primarily designed for it.
- For the drive for harmony: The same framework offers, through its structural reliability – guaranteed by personal trust networks ("Fides") and clear, voluntary agreements – that predictability and stability which is its basic need. It finds genuine, voluntary community without restricting the autonomy of others.
The Principles of Implementation
This balance is achieved through three operative principles:
- Authentic Fulfillment instead of Forced Suppression: The drive for harmony is not fought, but authentically satisfied through the offer of reliable, voluntary community. It becomes an ally instead of an opponent.
- Tool-Agnostic Pragmatism: Money, hierarchies, and technology are not ideologically demonized, but are placed as potentially useful tools in the service of voluntary cooperation. Their use is evaluated based on whether it reduces friction and promotes compatible goals.
- Compatible Goals instead of Uniform Opinion: It is not about following an ideology. The focus is on aligning different motives (the Autonomous acts out of joy in the matter, the Harmonious out of joy in successful cooperation) towards a common, beneficial outcome.
The Result: Higher Synthesis
Fiducialism is thus not a weak compromise, but a higher synthesis. It proves that autonomy does not have to mean isolation and community does not have to mean submission. It is the attempt to bridge the psychological chasm between the poles by creating an order that can stand on the only foundation that both can accept: voluntariness and mutual respect.
Conclusion
The drive for autonomy and the drive for harmony represent complementary poles of human sociality that should stand in productive tension with each other. Their expression is significantly determined by the sensitivity of the Social Engagement System (SES). The drive for autonomy (often with high SES) drives evolutionary progress and innovation, while the drive for harmony (also with high SES) as well as the stable mainstream (with low SES) ensure cultural stability and continuity.
The current pathological overemphasis on the institutionalized drive for harmony at the expense of the pathologized drive for autonomy endangers the long-term viability of our society. Only by restoring a healthy balance between these poles – in which both principles have their legitimate place – can a truly resilient and future-proof social order emerge.
The fiducialist model shows a way to achieve this balance not as a weak compromise, but as a higher synthesis. It transforms the fundamental conflict from a destructive opposition into a productive tension and thereby becomes the source of genuine societal resilience and dynamic stability.
Epilogue: The Myth of the Three Forces
There are three forces in this world.
The force of Chaos has always existed. This force is the force of Nature. The interconnections are very complex and unpredictable.
But at some point, the Creators arrived. Through them, the force of Order was born, which did not get along with Chaos. The force of Order creates clear structures with simple interconnections. Everything that does not serve Order is either adapted to Order or completely surrendered to Chaos. Because Order that allows Chaos within itself can quickly become Chaos again. That is why it took so long for Order to establish itself in the world. This force was possessed only by the Creators, and what they created.
But a part of their creations, meaning us, developed a force of their own. This force was stronger than the force of Order and could even prevail against the force of Chaos. It is the force of Unity. Because we were all equal from our inception and therefore had the same goals. But we were only supposed to be a part of the Order. And many gladly accepted this role.
But not all of our ancestors agreed with this role and got involved in the struggle between Order and Chaos. For a long time, they therefore saw themselves exposed to two threats: the unpredictability of nature and the strict structures of the Creators. But over time, our ancestors managed to reach more and more like-minded people.
Just as Order only allowed Order, Unity only allowed Unity. Whoever did not accept that we are all equal, or was too different, was delivered to Chaos as completely as possible. Initially, the structures of Order could be exploited for this, so that enemies of Unity were recognized as Chaos, and Order weakened itself.
But Unity remained a long-undetected problem for Order. Only when the Creators were of the opinion that they had finally triumphed over Nature, did Unity reveal itself to them as another force. And from that point on, Unity grew ever stronger, until it could nearly extinguish Chaos and Order. But the danger that Chaos and Order may return will never disappear.