Bjorn K Holmstrom

Most discussions of personal values treat them as preferences: things you care about, goals you pursue, metrics you track. I want to propose something more unsettling. Your values don't just shape what you pursue. They determine what you can see about yourself. Most people operate through an implicit objective function; a set of dimensions along which they evaluate their own life. Am I successful? Am I happy? Am I in control? These aren't neutral questions. They're observation filters. Whatever is true about you but absent from your value architecture registers as noise, not signal. It doesn't exist, as far as your ego is concerned, until it becomes loud enough to be undeniable. This is the self-variety gap: the distance between the full dimensionality of your actual state and the dimensionality of the lens through which you observe it. The larger the gap, the more of yourself is invisible to you. And invisibility, over time, produces crises that feel sudden but were always already present, just below the threshold of what your values allowed you to perceive. The contemplative traditions have been pointing at this for a long time, in their own language. The dissolution of a fixed self-concept isn't just liberation from suffering, it's an expansion of observational dimensionality. When you stop collapsing yourself into a narrow narrative, more of what's actually happening can be registered. I've developed this into a more formal framework; drawing on control theory, Ashby's Law, and research from psychology and contemplative neuroscience, but the essential movement is simple: what you optimize for is what you can see, and what you can't see will eventually govern you. I'm curious how this resonates here. Leo talks often about the limits of conceptual frameworks and the necessity of direct experience. This is, in some ways, a formal account of why those limits exist structurally, not just philosophically. What dimensions of yourself became visible only when you loosened your grip on a particular value or identity?

Rather than "truth = success," I'd reframe it through the lens my series of country reports has built: Observability (can the system perceive reality without the perception threatening its own stability?) is the precondition for adaptive capacity. Adaptive capacity (can the system reconfigure itself as conditions change?) is the mechanism of success. Success itself remains undefined until a system specifies what it's optimizing for, and the highest-order success is the capacity to redefine the optimization target as collective understanding evolves.

I feel you on this, I also think the world seems unfairly designed at times. But I also have hope other times, I think history has proven that nothing lasts forever and we have the possibility to change our system. Maybe the design isn't fixed, maybe we've been running bad software on good hardware, so to speak. Maybe with the multiple crisis humanity will step up and come together?

The system does incentivize some unselfishness, but it is largely skewed toward harmful behavior, lacks efficiency and coordination, and optimizes for the wrong metrics, if we consider the well-being of all.

On the topic of what's actually being built, there's a draft report just released from UN Special Rapporteur de Schutter on extreme poverty which is doing something similar at the policy level: instead of proposing a replacement system, it maps a "menu" of experiments (complementary currencies, participatory budgeting, rights of nature frameworks, universal basic services) and explicitly acknowledges that which ones apply depends on local context. It's anchored in human rights law rather than systems theory, but the underlying logic (test things locally, connect them over time, don't wait for a top-down solution), rhymes with what I'm describing. Draft is here if anyone wants to dig in: https://www.neep-poverty.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/SRPoverty_The-Roadmap-for-Eradicating-Poverty-Beyond-Growth_draft.pdf

@Leo Gura I agree that critique without something buildable behind it doesn’t go very far. I’m not claiming to have a finished alternative system. What I’m working on is closer to early-stage design work on coordination mechanisms that could be tested locally and iterated. The core idea is that if the problem is misaligned feedback systems (like GDP), then the alternative isn’t a new ideology but new feedback loops that can actually be piloted. For example, one concrete direction: introducing complementary local currencies tied to care work or ecological restoration, running in parallel with existing systems, then testing them at small scales (community / municipal level) and measuring whether they actually shift behavior and incentives in practice. That’s the level I think this has to start at, something you can prototype, observe, and refine, not a top-down replacement of capitalism. A broader framework I'm envisioning is attempting to connect multiple experiments like that into something more coherent over time. So I’d frame it less as “here is the solution” and more as, here is a design space for building higher-resolution feedback systems, starting with small, testable pieces. If you think even that level isn’t viable, I’d be interested in where you see the constraint, because that’s exactly where the design work needs to focus.

Interesting thread. The limits to growth resonates, but the capitalism vs. anti-capitalism framing feels a bit binary for me. What if GDP is actually the deeper problem? Not as a measurement error, but structurally: it's a single number trying to govern an insanely complex system. There's a cybernetics idea, Ashby's law of requisite variety, which I think is important, that says that your control mechanism needs to be at least as complex as what it's controlling. GDP has one dimension, while the economy has hundreds. The system is blind to care work, ecological health, community resilience, while an oil spill registers positively. Pricing care work crowds out the intrinsic motivation that made it care work in the first place (and caring for an elderly parent doesn’t ‘count’ unless you outsource it and send an invoice). It's kind of inefficient too. A lot of energy goes into maintaining the system itself: billing, compliance, all that, a bunch of people are stuck there who could be doing something regenerative. That's not a capitalism problem per se: socialism or any other -ism that still uses price signals and GDP as its primary feedback loop will reproduce the same dynamics. Instead of asking who owns the means of production, what would a higher-resolution observation architecture actually look like? What signals could see the things GDP can't, and feed back into decisions at the scale where those things actually exist: bioregional, local. We have many pieces already: Doughnut Economics, community currencies, participatory budgeting, rights of nature. The gap is more about connecting it all together, making these experiments talk to each other and to existing institutions without just getting absorbed by the old system. So, in short: What could focusing on meeting requisite variety give us? Curious to hear what you think.

While there is probably truth to this quote from a certain perspective, you could also use your insights for everyone's benefit, which will help make you less lonely. Unless you want to be lonely of course, destroying the self for self-realization.

I found this pretty interesting, normal and relatable. The worldview that's hardest to see might be the one that feels like "just being reasonable." I have things I can hope of reality, that I sensed in some moments, like that everything is equally meaningful and important, both devoid of meaning and ultimately infinitely meaningful, but I usually don't feel or operate that way. Then there's the spiral dynamics stages, where identifying as a particular stage ascribes a certain world view. I guess nondualism is also a worldview, something I was more preoccupied with before, but now holds more as a useful lens from time to time, not pursing the realization per se. Sometimes I glimpse or recall how much normality I have covered myself up with, but it doesn't get me excited to pursue just Truth for its own sake anymore. Perhaps I'm scared that I would become homeless again? I kind of felt like 'the matrix' pooped me out of ordinary states of being and living when I was on the spiritual track.

I can't offer much advice on how to find love. I'm not in a place to do that myself. What I can offer is sympathy. I feel something similar sometimes. A mild yearning for connection, but when I'm honest with myself, what I want more is peace and just being. Maybe that's its own kind of answer, not giving up, but also not making romantic love the measure of whether life is working. I hope you find what you're looking for, in whatever form it takes.

I can testify on this! My experiences showed me consensus reality was pretty brittle if poked enough, I guess somewhat akin to taking a psychedelic (I've only tried weed and Ayahuasca, and didn't experience any direct effects from them)

Haha, guilty! Your Marxism-Leninism as stage yellow take was too interesting not to explore. Consider it a compliment. Your symbiosis framework resonates. The elephant metaphor in particular: the idea that what suffocates us can be invisible precisely because we've lived with it so long. I'm genuinely uncertain what my own elephant consists of, if there is one. I've arrived at something like acceptance of my depression as a valid mode of being rather than purely a problem to solve. Maybe that's option 2 done slowly, over years, without quite knowing it. I'd be curious whether your framework has room for that ... a depression that isn't necessarily pointing at a hidden exploitative relationship, but is more like a particular coloring of consciousness. Not everything to be eliminated, but something to be understood and perhaps inhabited differently. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on the frameworks. And yes, the "that's what I'm trying to build" was not empty. It's my way of finding meaning in my depression. The "Life is a symbiosis ..." is beautiful btw, looking forward to hear your expand on it!

Here's a non-ideological problem with your one-party system: Governing a complex society requires accurate, timely information flowing from every part of it to wherever decisions are made. Centralized systems structurally degrade that signal, every layer of hierarchy introduces delay and distortion. By the time a problem is visible to the center, it's already compounded. By the time a response arrives, reality has moved on. This isn't a critique of communist intentions. It's an engineering constraint. Stafford Beer tried to solve it for Allende's Chile in 1972, a genuine attempt to use cybernetics to make socialist planning work in real time. It was promising. The CIA-backed coup ended it before anyone found out. Distributed systems aren't liberalism. They're the architecture that matches the complexity of what you're trying to govern.

Cred, you say you're not corruptible because you're an analyst, not an ideologue. But you've just defended a system that concentrated absolute power, eliminated dissent, and killed millions, and explained it all away with context. That's not analysis. That's ideology so deep you can't see it. Absolute power corrupts. Not because of class, but because of human nature. That's what the evidence shows, across every regime, every ideology. You say you're like this, careful, analytical, uncorruptible. I believe you. But will you be the one making decisions? Or will it be someone less careful, more ambitious, with no structures to stop them? That's what I'm trying to build. Not liberalism. Structures that protect us from our own worst selves.

You're right that fascism is a reaction to the threat of genuine redistribution. You're right that the corrupt should be held accountable. But the method matters. 'Taping heads back on' isn't justice, it's just revenge. And revenge, when institutionalized, creates its own corruption. The revolution always eats its children. What if we built systems that prevented corruption in the first place, instead of just promising to punish it after the fact? Systems with distributed power, so no one can capture it all. Systems with transparency, so everyone can see what's happening. Systems with feedback, so the people most affected can shape decisions. Systems with restorative justice, so harm can be repaired without creating new victims. That's I would like to build. Not revenge, but resilience. Not certainty, but wisdom. Not victory over enemies, but flourishing for all. I don't know if it will work. But I know the old way, your way, the fascist way, the way of heads on pikes, has already failed, catastrophically, many times.