A World Fit for People

You are What Counts

The aim of the THEE Online Project is to contribute to the creation of a world fit for people, like you, to live in.

Any helping, respecting, coordinating, designing, cooperating, relating, managing, implementing, persuading, compromising, monitoring &c. is about a unique person dealing with other unique people.

  • Organizations and governments are not human beings.
  • Organizations and governments cannot function in a truly human way.
  • Organizations and governments do not actually do anything.

Personal uniqueness flows from the reality that only individuals have the power to decide and act, or to refuse to do something. In doing or not doing, each person must use their abilities and handle their frailties. So the more we understand this process of willing committed action, the better.

The Taxonomy is about our functioning and identity when we each act with commitment. As recurrent political atrocities and the experiments of Milgram and Zimbardo indicate: left to ourselves and caught up in a system, too many of us too easily surrender our deep humanity to inner callous tendencies and external ruthless authority. As a common framework, the Taxonomy can bring these potentials into the open and offer universal positive options to counter these undesirable tendencies.

Identity, Diversity & Ethical Design

Most everyone prefers people who are like themselves. We tend to avoid alien ways of thinking and acting. This response is instinctive, commencing in infancy as «stranger anxiety», and potentially institutionalized in racism and belief in the superiority of the culture in which we are reared.

Social environments and our globalized society no longer allow us the liberty of avoiding people who are not like us. However, to achieve as part of a team or community requires more than just tolerating differences. We must actively value differences—and even become more comfortable about trying alternative perspectives in certain situations.

Taking the identity of each and all seriously is probably one of the great challenges facing us in coming decades. Frameworks in the Taxonomy directly address this challenge. They allow us to design social arrangements in ways that go with the grain of human nature, rather than rubbing against it. As a result, THEE represents an ethical design approach to endeavours, relationships, politics and interventions.

If you appreciate and assimilate those frameworks of most relevance to your work and life, you are likely to benefit personally. However, at the same time, you will benefit others through your interactions, and that benefit may ramify far more widely.

Originally posted: July 2009; Last updated: 2-Sep-2018.