Principles

1. Why Missionism exists

   Missionism exists to help design organizations so that the rational self-interest of the contributor, the organization, and the customer or beneficiary can point the same way.

   The purpose statement is the aim of the protocol. It is not a completeness test by itself.

2. Alignment completeness test

   An organizational design is incomplete while the incentives of the contributor, the organization, and the customer or beneficiary diverge.

   Use this as a design test: if contributor, organization, and customer or beneficiary incentives diverge, the design is unfinished.

3. Mission over permanent entitlement

   Authority and economics should not remain permanently concentrated merely because someone arrived first.

   Organizations exist to accomplish something. Arrival order is not a permanent title to future value that other people create.

4. Missions are measurable

   A Missionism organization must publicly state a measurable mission; revenue or market capitalization alone is not a sufficient mission.

   Normally expressible as increase X or decrease X. Financial size alone does not define the mission.

5. Missions are recursive

   Missions may contain child missions and participate in parent missions.

   Larger missions can contain smaller ones. Semi-autonomy at each node is compatible with contribution upward.

6. Child missions keep autonomy

   A child mission may retain autonomy while contributing to a parent mission.

   Joining a parent mission need not mean surrendering product, hiring, or internal allocation.

7. Forking is a feature

   Missionism-compatible systems must permit exit and independent continuation; a fork is not automatically the canonical Missionism specification.

   Disagreement should produce forks, not capture of the governing organization. Canonical naming stays versioned.

8. Missionism should survive its founder

   If a better version of Missionism is created, people should be free to use it instead.

   The protocol is not finished ideology. Better versions should be free to win on merit.

Constraints bind implementations without freezing a single mechanism.

1. Later contributors need a path to ownership

   People who create enduring value must have a viable path to meaningful ownership of that value.

   Exact instruments (equity, units, profit share, trusts) are mechanisms. The constraint is that a real path exists.

2. Voluntary adoption

   Missionism proposes rules for organizations that voluntarily use the system; it does not claim jurisdiction over every organization or every life.

   Missionism does not decide which lawful missions people must pursue, or what a worthwhile life is.

Individually identified floor rules (HC-01…HC-05). HUMAN_COMPACT.md explains them; it does not originate them.

1. HC-01 · Equal human standing

   Every person has equal human standing.

2. HC-02 · Freedom of conscience

   People may believe, worship, question, speak, disagree, and change their minds, while protecting that freedom for others.

3. HC-03 · Nonviolence and non-coercion

   Missions may not achieve ends through violence, intimidation, or domination.

4. HC-04 · Ideas challengeable; people retain dignity

   Ideas and missions are challengeable; people retain dignity and must not be made the enemy of the mission.

5. HC-05 · Reciprocity

   The freedoms, dignity, and protections claimed for oneself must also be granted to people one profoundly disagrees with.

Example of the intended layering. Only the claim text below is Canonical. The equity instrument is Proposed.

Organizations become complicated when people must constantly be persuaded, monitored or forced to act in the organization’s interest.

Rules can manage misalignment. They do not eliminate it.

The better solution is to make more of the desired behavior individually rational.

A good organizational mechanism should therefore remove more coordination than it creates.

If Missionism requires endless committees to determine who deserves what, it has failed.

If a small number of ownership rules cause thousands of independent decisions to point toward the mission without central permission, it is working.

The goal is not more governance. It is less governance made possible by better alignment.

Design test: Every mechanism must remove more coordination complexity than it adds.

Not yet Canonical. Candidate for the core corpus after experiments show it holds. See Why now for the fuller argument.

• what missions people must pursue
• what a worthwhile life is
• which religion or philosophy is correct
• which lawful mission someone must join
• how every organization must measure value