First Principles and First Values

We stand at a time between worlds, a time between stories-poised between dystopia and utopia. How we respond will have consequences and reverberations for many generations. First Principles and First Values offers both the most compelling diagnosis and the most effective and indeed joyful response to the looming threat of existential and catastrophic risk. The core diagnosis is a "global intimacy disorder." This intimacy disorder is generated by and expressed as the modern success story which is the dominant narrative in virtually all of worldwide culture. The success story pits us against each other in rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose dynamics. This in turn generates what systems theory refers to as complicated or fragile systems which are optimized for short-term profit and efficiency rather than long-term resilience and depth. Intimacy-whether in a couple, a nation or in the earlier worlds of biology and molecular coherence-is only possible when there is a shared Story of Value. At the molecular level such a story is implicit in the scientific laws of Cosmos. At the human moral level, the shared story of value needs to be explicated and made conscious. To respond to the meta crisis, we must be able not only to restore premodern ethnocentric intimacies rooted in premodern visions of shared value or even the early modern intimacies of democracies, markets and liberal culture, rooted in implicit modern assumptions of value. Rather we need to evolve a new global intimacy rooted in First Principles and First Values which are the grammar for a shared language of value.

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Marc Gafni

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