Chapter 3: The Foundation — Companion Notes

Key links and next steps to go deeper on constitutional principles for post-scarcity societies.

Read these next

• Goodhart’s Law and AI Governance: why rules-based systems fail and principle-based constitutions succeed.
• Roman Emergency Powers: historical lessons on how exceptions become norms.
• Emergency Protocol Design: architectural safeguards against constitutional drift.

Try this

• Identify the 3-5 inviolable principles your organization/community would never compromise, even under pressure.
• Stress-test your current governance against Goodhart’s Law: what metrics could be gamed to undermine intent?
• Draft an “Emergency Protocol” for your team/org with automatic sunset clauses and cooling-off periods.

Historical parallels explored

• The Philadelphia Convention (1787): How 55 men in 90°F heat created principles that outlasted their framers.
• The Soviet Five-Year Plans: How measurement killed meaning and paperwork replaced production.
• The Roman Republic’s Collapse: How emergency powers normalized until dictatorship became constitutional.

Coming soon

• Constitutional design patterns for AI-augmented governance.
• Case studies of principle-based vs. rule-based regulatory systems.