The Six Axioms – The Human Race

The Axioms of Ways

Our answer is to match our Ways to our ever-accelerating Things. The Axioms of Ways is made up of six working principles that offer a new approach.

The Stories of the Axioms

The Hawaiian star compass: a ring of named houses around the horizon, with a frigatebird at its centre.

Axiom 1 of 6

See: Other Ways of Knowing asks us to see – to widen the aperture beyond any one tradition, discipline or feed.

The corrective has a name: epistemic humility. The humility of ignorance. It means holding your view firmly enough to act and loosely enough to learn. It means accepting that no single perspective, no one ideology, no lone problem-solving tradition is complete – and then acting anyway, because the humility of ignorance is not a licence for paralysis. It is the precondition for steering a course in the right direction.

We are not asking to slow down. Epistemic humility allows us to catch up.

From The Human Race, Part Two, page 49

A cairn of balanced stones on a shoreline, the sea and sky soft behind it.

Axiom 2 of 6

Renew: Regeneration asks us to renew – to heal living systems rather than merely slow their decline.

Regeneration asks a much larger question and takes a more complex – yet not complicated – position. Not how little can we take, but what can we put back. Not how do we hold this degraded thing steady, but how do we make it whole again and then let it flourish past where it was. Sustainability is defensive; it minimises the harm. Regeneration is active; it builds and refreshes the ingredients and processes of health. The distance between reducing harm and creating health is the whole of this Axiom, and it is wider than it looks.

From The Human Race, Part Two, page 60

Rows of solar panels stretching to the horizon at sunset.

Axiom 3 of 6

Transform: Abundance 2.0 asks us to transform – to decide whether the plenty now within reach is built for the few or the many.

The pattern is the one we have been warning about throughout. Abundance 1.0 was a triumph of the Innovation of Things with almost none of the Innovation of Ways to govern it. We built the what at a staggering pace and left the how on the shelf. Plenty arrived and because no one had designed how it would be shared, it pooled – exactly where it always pools, with whoever already held the capital, the land, the machines.

From The Human Race, Part Two, page 71

Earthrise: the Earth rising over the lunar horizon, photographed from Apollo 8 on 24 December 1968.

Axiom 4 of 6

Inspire: The Stories We Tell asks us to inspire – to recruit people into futures worth building.

Let us be precise, because “storytelling” has been worked over by the communications industry until it means almost nothing. Brand stories. Narrative strategies. Executives told to become better storytellers the way they are told to improve their golf.

That is not this axiom. This axiom is structural.

Stories may be the oldest Innovation of Ways. Long before we had institutions, laws or markets, we coordinated through shared narratives. Every large-scale human achievement begins as a story enough people agree to inhabit.

From The Human Race, Part Two, page 83

Photograph: NASA, Apollo 8, 24 December 1968

The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau: book cover with an engraved portrait of Rousseau.

Axiom 5 of 6

Commit: The Social Contract asks us to commit – to sign up for explicitly named ways.

Be clear about what a social contract is not, because the words have been debased. It is not surveillance. It is not compliance. It is not the forty seven pages you agreed to this morning. A real social contract is built on something much simpler, and much harder: mutual obligation, shared purpose, explicit commitment. The best ones are not naive about human nature – they acknowledge power and try to distribute it more fairly; they acknowledge self-interest and align it with the collective good; they assume people are neither saints nor sinners, and they build conditions in which our better angels win more often than not.

From The Human Race, Part Two, page 94

The word TRUST set in stone letters on concrete, a crack running through it between the R and the U.

Axiom 6 of 6

Act: Truth and Trust asks us to stand on solid ground and act.

This axiom demands leaders who are the Wayfinders we introduced earlier. Transparent about what is provisional. Willing to revise in the face of new facts – not alternative facts. Oriented, plainly and checkable, toward the common good, so that trust survives even when particular truths must be updated. Epistemic humility, to be honest and to act. The first axiom taught that posture as a way of knowing. The last one reveals what it was all along: the only known way of being trusted.

From The Human Race, Part Two, page 113

The Axioms in Action

The axioms are not for every decision. Our Five Horsemen, however, are excellent examples of long running, complex, and existential issues of our day – ideal to showcase how the Axioms frame the discussion and connect.

What decision do you need to make?

Select a Horseman to see which Axioms apply

One primary operational axiom: Regeneration. The planetary science has existed for fifty years. The barrier is will, narrative, and the stories we have chosen to tell about growth and stewardship.

See Other Ways of Knowing

Renew Regeneration

Transform Abundance 2.0

Inspire The Stories We Tell

Commit The Social Contract

Act Truth and Trust

The six Axioms. Select any to expand