Looking Out for Yourself in Society

An Everyday Self and our Better Self

Combining Individualist and Communalist approaches to ethical choice generates a Q Arena dealing with prosperity.

The taxonomy has put flesh on the 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.

This 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. Taxonomic investigation confirmed this sense when it revealed the presence of a «better self» within the Root complex. The better self calls for egotism to be transcended, not least because it is the source 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 and Hasidic rabbis, who are actively and continuously respected and supported by their local community.

It is our everyday self that provides 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 fail to handle yourself effectively. So the framework is entitled, perhaps provocatively for those who see individualism as the bane of society, «Looking Out for Yourself».

Financial security, the Spiral evolution which draws successively and cumulatively on all the interacting for benefit approaches, contributes to looking after yourself. The Tree pattern, which emerges from that spiral pattern, provides a framework for social standing, which is the unavoidable context for all personal efforts on your own behalf.

All the interacting-for-benefit approaches are self-serving. Taking them together will therefore maximize the pursuit of self-interest. As in previous similar frameworks, a key value from each approach must 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.

ClosedTechnical 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, which give the function of that level an essential characteristic. The qualifier applicable to a particular level finds its nature originating in the Level (or Monad) where it first appears e.g. the Monadic qualifier is created by Level-1 (or G11); the Dyadic qualifier is created by Level-2 (or G12), and so on. Internal levels that carry the qualifier are labelled with a lower case 'g' e.g. g4 refers to the 4th Level in each of the Tetrads, Pentads, Hexads and the Heptad and always has the same qualifier. Note that g4 does not exist in the Monads, Dyads or Triads which have less than 4 internal Levels.

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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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Originally posted: 10-July-2025.