Looking Out for Yourself in Society

Everyday Self and our Better Self

The taxonomy has put flesh that truism that each of us is egotistical and yet we must protect the socio-physical environment on which we depend. Unrestrained individualism leads to the tragedy of the commons—the destruction of goods that we all share.

Investigation of methods for getting benefit from our interactions with others generated a structure in which common-sense was confirmed.

The interacting for benefit framework (PH'4Q4t) turned out to be part of a Q-Arena for Governing which is created by a combination of individualist ethical choice (PH'4L4) and communalist ethical choice (PH'4L5).

Intuitively, we are aware that there is more to life than rank individualism, even if modulated by communalism. Again, taxonomic investigation confirmed this sense when it revealed the presence of a «better self». The better self calls for egotism to be transcended, not least because it is basis of evil.

However, the better self is not a replacement for our everyday self. We must not, indeed cannot, neglect our everyday self. The only people who can do that are those, like Buddhist monks, who are actively and continuously supported by their local community.

It is our everyday self that ensures our shelter, our nourishment, our clothing, our health and our social life. It ensures we are protected against the weather, against those who seek to do us harm, and even against bad luck. It delivers us comforts, pleasures and entertainments. Our better self offers guidance in pursuing these needs and desires, but that is all it can do.

Naming

The framework to be developed here could be entitled «Looking after Yourself», but the problem for our everyday self is that everyone wants the same thing. Everyday life has an unavoidable competitive element. To ignore that is to suffer unnecessarily. So the framework is entitled, perhaps provocatively, «Looking Out for Yourself».

Financial security, which draws on all the interacting for benefit approaches, contributes to looking after yourself. The Tree pattern, which emerges from the spiral pattern, provides for social standing, and this is the context for any personal effort on your own behalf.

All the interacting-for-benefit approaches are self-serving. Taking them altogether will maximize self-interest. It is evident, once again, that a key value from each approach will need to be identified. Treating these as monads to be combined in a structural hierarchy can be expected to identify essential components for self-management and self-sufficiency insofar as that is possible.

The Structural Hierarchy

The taxonomic form that provides for the necessary cumulation of key interacting-or benefit values is a Structural Hierarchy. Each Level in such a hierarchy is a Grouping and contains all Levels of the originating hierarchy, the framework for social standing in this case. This section will investigate the Groupings and offer provisional formulations which deserve further checking and refinement.

Technical Details:

Structural Hierarchies are developed by progressively grouping adjacent Levels of THEE’s 7-Level holistic hierarchies in all possible ways. «Holistic» means that Levels in the hierarchy broadly imply or include each other, and this applies here.

The first «Level» in a Structural Hierarchy is a Grouping of 1 Level i.e. Grouping-1 (G1) contains 7 Groups that are Monads i.e. made up of 1 original Level. The next «Level» will contain all Groups of 2 adjacent Levels i.e. G2 contains 6 Dyads…and so on until we reach G7, the Heptad Grouping where there is just one Group consisting of all 7 original Levels. As a result, every G-Level contains all the Levels of the originating hierarchy i.e. the original differentiation of an entity into Levels has been replaced by a re-unification applicable at each G-Level.There are 28 Groups (components) in a Structural Hierarchy.

However, definition of this THEE form is far more complex. Internal Levels i.e. the Levels within any Group, have distinctive qualifiers, and are labelled with a lower case 'g', e.g. g4 refers to the 4^th Level in each of the Tetrads, Pentads, Hexads and the Heptad; and so g4 does not exist in the Monads, Dyads or Triads which have less than 4 internal Levels.

See sH Image:

The Groupings and their Groups are ways to overcome the differentiation and discontinuity demanded by the hierarchical stratification of approaches to benefiting. They have unique functions and properties and explain phenomena easily noticed in social life.

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Get Started

• Preview the structure in terms of the function, requirement and state of each of the groupings.
• To get a further feel for the hierarchy, see an account of the battle between self-assertion and psychosocial realism.

• See the full picture and summary tables in the review section.

  OR

• Start with serving self-interest.

 

Originally posted: 30-Jun-2025.