The letter came on a Tuesday. Mara, forty-one, a hydraulic engineer at the enterprise for river and banks, had been drawn by lot into the regional assembly for one year. She had never wanted an office, and she would have been allowed to decline. On the first day of the session she sat between an elected farmer and a cook who had been drawn by lot, and in front of them lay the region’s budget, open to anyone who wanted to read it. “You don’t need to know anything,” said the cook, who was already in her second year. “You only need to ask until you understand. That is what we are here for.”
Fundamental Rights and the Weighing between Them
At the centre of SOLIS stands a double promise: you are free, and you are protected, part of a community that neither crushes you nor leaves you alone. That sounds self-evident, and yet existing orders often fail at exactly this point. They guarantee rights that are complete on paper and remain empty in real life: a right to education where the schools are crumbling, a right to health that depends on wealth, a freedom of expression that is silenced by economic or algorithmic power. SOLIS draws a fundamental conclusion from this: rights are only as strong as their practical safeguards. It is not enough to proclaim them. They must be tangible, measurable, and enforceable in everyday life.
The fundamental rights that SOLIS guarantees include the right to life and to physical and mental integrity, freedom of opinion, belief, and conscience, and freedom of movement, of assembly, and of the choice of education and occupation. To these is added secure access to the material foundations of a dignified life: water, food, housing, energy, education, health, and participation. This last guarantee is not a charity but the condition of all the other freedoms. There is no freedom in starving, and no freedom in dying of a treatable illness because the means are lacking. Beyond human beings, SOLIS recognizes a claim to protection of the natural world in its own right. How this claim takes effect is set out in the chapter on the planet.
So that these rights do not remain abstract, they are anchored in procedures and institutions, and their actual state is recorded continuously. Monitoring fundamental rights is a task of the independent transparency and review body that this chapter will introduce. It regularly measures how things stand with people’s real freedom and dignity, not in the statute books but in everyday life. Where it turns out that certain groups are systematically disadvantaged, targeted programmes are triggered to reduce the inequality. Guaranteeing a right thus includes the duty to check that it is honoured.
The Absolute Floor and the Procedure of Weighing
The hardest case is not the violation of a single right but the conflict of two rights with each other. Here it is not enough to point to wise judgment in the situation, because that shifts the real decision into the discretion of those who make it. SOLIS replaces this discretion with a procedure that has fixed limits. First comes an absolute floor: human dignity and physical and mental integrity cannot be weighed. They form a threshold below which no good is traded off against another. No argument from the common good and no gain in efficiency justifies violating them.
Above this threshold, conflicts are decided by a regulated standard of proportionality. Whoever wants to restrict a right bears the burden of justification, not the person whose right is to be restricted. The mildest effective means must always be chosen. The decision must be justified in public, is subject to review by the ethics councils and the courts, and is documented as a precedent, so that like cases are treated alike in future. Weighing thus becomes a traceable procedure with a fixed floor, a clear burden of proof, and the possibility of review, and not a matter of goodwill.
The Order of Power: the Ring
There is a problem that recurs in the history of every form of rule: power tends to preserve itself, to strengthen itself, and to protect itself. It attracts money, influence, and networks of cronies. It forms closed circles in which interests cover for one another. In the end, the integrity of institutions suffers, as do the trust of citizens and the ability of society to act for the long term. An order that does not solve this problem but merely moves it elsewhere is not viable.
Why the Rule of the Wise Fails
The obvious answer is to put the cleverest and most upright at the top, selected through a careful procedure that tests for wisdom, achievement in life, and strength of character. This answer is seductive, and history has refuted it. Plato’s philosopher kings, the Chinese mandarinate, the Leninist vanguard: each of these designs began with the promise of selecting the best and ended in the concentration of power. The reason does not lie in the failure of individual people. It lies in a structural weakness: wisdom and integrity cannot be measured objectively. Where an order makes them the criterion of selection, the selection procedure itself becomes the most valuable good and thus the target of capture. Whoever controls the filter controls the system. The demand “we will simply select good people” therefore does not solve the problem of power. It moves it to a place that is harder to control.
SOLIS draws a clear conclusion from this: a nicer description of the governing body is not enough. In its place must come a hard mechanism that resists the very dynamic the order itself names. This mechanism is that there is no top.
The Ring Instead of the Top
In SOLIS there is at the top neither a president nor a monarch, neither a party nor a computer. Power is not built as a pyramid but as a ring: a circle of bodies that check one another and none of which is the final authority. Whoever is bound into this circle is called “ringed” in this work, a new word for a new condition: bound in, bound to one another, with no way out at the top.
The assemblies are the place where the rules are made. At every level of the order, in the neighbourhood, the region, and the country, they debate and pass the laws and budgets of their area. They have a mixed membership: partly elected people, who answer for their proposals and their disclosed ties, and partly citizens chosen by lot. The elected part brings programmes and responsibility. The part chosen by lot brings society in its full breadth into the chamber and breaks the cartels that form around every election. No group can move the assembly on its own, because it can neither buy nor win in advance the part that the lot fills.
The offices held for a term carry out what the assemblies decide: they administer, build, supply, and organize. Their heads are appointed by suitability in an open procedure, serve for a limited term, rotate, and give account. No office belongs to a person. Each is lent to them and taken back again.
The Council of the Wise is one of these bodies, but not their summit. Its task is long-term orientation across disciplines, thinking beyond the horizon of the day’s questions, which supplies the other bodies with drafts and assessments. It advises, drafts, and warns. It does not command and does not decide alone. Its strength lies in judgment, not in control.
The ethics councils act at every level as reviewers of the foundations. They examine planned laws and far-reaching decisions not only for legal and economic coherence but for their compatibility with the five foundations. Their members come from many fields, from science, philosophy, the arts, care work, the crafts, and the groups that are otherwise not heard, and they have a strong right of review and a suspensive veto. They can halt developments that fundamentally contradict the values of the order and return the matter to the assembly and the citizenry. They thus have influence, not unlimited power.
The courts apply the law bindingly and equally to everyone. What is decisive is that they also apply it to the other bodies of the Ring. No office and no institution stands above the law.
The transparency and review body, finally, secures the foundation without which the Ring cannot work: open access to information. It ensures that decisions, flows of money, and conflicts of interest can be traced, it monitors the state of fundamental rights, and it prevents any body from blinding the others by holding knowledge alone.
These bodies check one another in a circle. The assembly decides, but the ethics councils can halt. The office carries out, but the courts bind it. The Council of the Wise drafts, but it does not decide. The review body sees everything, but it commands nothing. None can act without the others, none stands above the others, and there is no point at which the chain of control ends. This is precisely the break with the pyramid: where there is no top, there is also no highest target for capture.
The Levels and Subsidiarity
The Ring is not one but many. The order is built in levels, from the neighbourhood through the town and the region to the country and up to the planetary level, which the chapter on the world order deals with. Each level is itself a ring with an assembly, offices, an ethics council, courts, and a review body. Between the levels, subsidiarity applies in its strict form: the higher level may do only what the lower one truly cannot. Decisions are made as close as possible to people and to the matter at hand, and power flows from the bottom up, not the other way round. A playground belongs to the neighbourhood, a waterworks to the region, a climate target to the union of countries.
The Citizenry as the Outer Anchor
A ring that turned only within itself would remain a closed system. That is why the Ring is anchored below in the people. The citizenry is the one node that sits outside the institutional circle, and it holds the constituent power: it can recall the bodies of the Ring, overrule them, and fill them anew. The members of the Council of the Wise and of the other bodies serve on a revocable mandate. Their authority is lent, not owned. In SOLIS, power is not a prize but a loan.
What the citizenry decides itself and what it leaves to the assemblies is precisely defined, so that neither gets out of hand. Four things belong directly to the citizenry: the adoption of the order itself, any change to its core, the recall and refilling of its bodies, and the questions that an assembly puts before it or that a petition with sufficient support brings to it. Everything else, laws, budgets, projects, and the everyday business of the order, is decided by the assemblies, in which the citizenry sits anyway through the lot. Thus the power of the people remains the root, without every water pipe becoming a referendum.
Here, however, lies a danger that SOLIS expressly avoids. Pure, direct majority power would bring back exactly the forces that the order rejects from the start: populism, manipulation, echo chambers, the babble of voices without direction. SOLIS already carries the answer within itself. The power of the citizenry is not exercised as a raw vote but structured by the deliberative participation system: informed, based on facts, and secured against manipulation. Before every decision by the citizenry, citizens receive checked and diverse information, access to expert forums, and aids to ethical deliberation. Only on this basis is the decision made. Thus the power of the people remains the root of legitimacy without tipping over into populism.
This brings together what does not hold when kept apart. Power is a ring without a top, the ring is grounded in the people, and the power of the people is filtered through deliberation. This is the application of the order to itself: SOLIS governs itself by the same principles by which it lets society govern itself.
The Mechanics against Capture
So that this remains a mechanism and not a mere principle, the Ring rests on four concrete components.
The first is sortition. Part of the assemblies and of the supervisory bodies is neither elected nor appointed but filled on a rotating basis by lot from the citizenry, following the model of the ancient boule and the jury. A lot cannot be bribed in advance. No career can be built on a lot. No stable cartel can form out of the lot. It is the incorruptible element of the system.
The second is compulsory rotation with term limits. Power passes through hands instead of settling in them. Where no one stays in one place long enough to make it their own, nothing hardens.
The third is the right of recall and reconstitution. The Council of the Wise and every other body can be dissolved and filled anew by a structured, informed majority of the citizenry. The guardians serve as long as their mandate holds, and no longer.
The fourth is the separation of control over information from the power of decision. No body may both determine what is known and decide what is done. The transparency and review body ensures that the base of knowledge is shared and open, so that no node can dominate the others through a monopoly on information.
The Lot and Expertise
The objection is obvious: how is a citizen chosen at random supposed to judge things they do not understand? The answer lies in the task that the lot performs. It fills not the expert task but the task of control. No one is chosen by lot to run a power station or to lead an operation. Those chosen by lot are the ones who check whether the operators and leaders act honestly, proportionately, and in the spirit of the foundations. That requires not a specialist degree but judgment, time, and good information. The last of these is provided by the review body, which assigns to every body chosen by lot experts of different schools who are allowed to contradict one another. Whoever is drawn is released from work for the duration of their service, and the service counts as a contribution. Whoever cannot or will not serve may decline. A lot that compelled would lose its dignity. Thus chance does not turn into amateurism but into what it has been in the jury for centuries: the incorruptible eye of the community.
The Selection of the Council of the Wise
From these components also follows the answer to the question on which the rule of the wise fails: how the Council of the Wise is filled without a hidden filter for wisdom becoming the object of capture.
SOLIS does without a body that decides on the wisdom of the candidates in a closed procedure. In its place comes a multi-stage, open procedure. Candidates are proposed widely and examined in public, against disclosed and contestable standards: demonstrable judgment, achievement in life, and proven capacity for responsibility, not an opaque score for “wisdom”. The decisive role in this procedure is played by a citizens’ panel chosen by lot, which itself changes and therefore cannot be bought in advance. The final constituent power and the right of recall remain with the citizenry. Terms of office are limited, and mandates are revocable. Wisdom is thus not certified once and for all. The Council remains accountable and replaceable at all times.
Deciding under Time Pressure
Deliberation takes time, and not every situation allows it. An epidemic, a dam breach, an attack on the power grid demand decisions within hours, not months. Here lurks the temptation of every order to create, in the name of necessity, an authority that stands above the rules, and history shows that such authority is rarely given back. SOLIS therefore builds the exception so that it ends itself. Emergency powers are possible, but they are narrowly defined, public, time-limited, and given an expiry date that is not extended without a new decision of the assembly. A body chosen partly by lot reviews every measure afterwards, and everything that was built up in the emergency is subject to the duty to dismantle it. The order can be fast without losing itself, because the speed has an end that is fixed at the beginning. How these stages look in detail is described in the chapter on security.
An Order that Holds with Fallible People
The decisive test of an order of power is not whether it works with good people, but whether it remains just with fallible, self-interested people. The Ring is built on this assumption. It does not require office holders to be wise and selfless. It requires only that no one can entrench themselves permanently. A circle without a top, whose bodies are partly chosen by lot, rotate, can be recalled, and are subject to open information, remains correctable even when individuals try to exploit it. At the same time, each individual remains responsible: whoever decides does so under their own name, with a public justification, and before the courts, which bind them like anyone else. SOLIS thus does not solve the question of power by hoping for better people. It solves it through a structure that withstands the human temptation to power, and precisely this distinguishes a robust design from a mere vision.
The Public Sphere, the Media, and the Question of Who Defines Reality
Where societies fall apart, the collapse is regularly preceded by a loss: the loss of a shared relation to reality. Without a functioning public sphere that is free and at the same time responsible, people no longer know what they can hold on to. Power elites determine the narratives without control, facts become weapons, and citizens lapse either into indifference or into fanaticism. SOLIS counters this with a media order that is not only free in the legal sense but ethically grounded, transparent, diverse, and accessible.
This order stands between two failures, and it avoids both. In authoritarian systems, media become tools of control. In systems driven purely by profit, they become machines for exploiting attention, which put ratings above substance and division above understanding, and in the digital public sphere, monopolies of opinion arise that use algorithms to decide what is perceived. SOLIS therefore knows neither state-controlled media nor a market that follows only the maximization of profit. Media organizations work according to a verifiable ethical code. Their ownership structures, flows of money, and conflicts of interest must be disclosed, because independence arises only where media are free and at the same time bear a responsibility.
This raises the hardest question of every open society, and SOLIS does not avoid it. A free public sphere must be able to defend itself against deliberate disinformation and manipulation that undermine common decisions. Yet any authority able to determine what counts as false becomes itself the greatest danger, the gateway through which the creeping advance of authoritarianism has historically entered. The answer therefore cannot lie in a ministry of truth that rules on the true and the false, but only in a procedure.
This procedure rests on several commitments. There is no state pre-censorship. The standard response to false or harmful statements is counter-speech, context, and labelling, not removal. Where an intervention is nevertheless considered, it follows an adversarial procedure: a review panel filled partly by lot decides, the burden of proof lies with the claim that something is false or manipulative, the justification is public, and the decision can be appealed. Above everything stands an immovable limit: this procedure may never be directed against criticism of SOLIS itself, of its institutions, or of its office holders. Political dissent is categorically protected. It is precisely this limit that prevents the necessary defence against manipulation from becoming the tool for holding on to power.
Transparency applies not only to the media but equally to the bodies of the order and to the economy. Decisions, flows of money, and conflicts of interest must be open to inspection. Registers of lobbying are mandatory and public, and citizens have the right to know who influenced a decision, which data it was based on, and which alternatives were examined. The digital platforms, finally, as the central arenas of today’s conversation, are treated as part of democratic infrastructure and not as a purely private matter. Their algorithms must be disclosed and open to review, other voices must find fair access, and they too are subject to the limits on procedure and protection already named.
The deepest safeguard, however, lies not in a body that intervenes but in education. A population that has learned from an early age to check sources, compare perspectives, and recognize manipulation is the strongest defence against the distortion of the public sphere, and it makes any intervening authority as unnecessary as possible. The aim of the media order is therefore not the perfect control of information. The aim is a mature society that does not let itself be manipulated, judges critically and with confidence, can argue without destroying itself, and can listen without submitting.
The Guardians and the Measuring Instruments
Particular vigilance is owed to the standards by which the order measures its own state. The protection of fundamental rights can be monitored, but every indicator that becomes a target loses its meaning over time: where a number decides on the well-being of the order, the temptation grows to serve the number instead of the matter. The hollowing out then happens not through open attack but silently, while the display goes on reporting health. SOLIS meets this in two ways. The standards themselves change, are set adversarially, and are deliberately called into question, and alongside measurable monitoring comes unpredictable review carried out by citizens, which cannot be prepared for. Thus not only the guardians are watched, but the measuring instruments too.
How the Order Changes
So that a learning order can change without losing itself, it needs a regulated way of changing its own rules. SOLIS distinguishes two levels for this. The core, that is, the five foundations, the fundamental rights, and the load-bearing safeguards against capture, is withdrawn from everyday politics: no assembly and no office can touch it. Only the citizenry itself can change it, and even then only under high hurdles: with a large majority, after thorough deliberation, with a time gap between decision and confirmation, and across more than one generation. Everything else moves more freely, through the assemblies and the deliberative participation system. This joins what fails when kept apart: the flexibility without which an order freezes, and the firmness without which it gives itself away.
The Right to Leave
The maturity that this work entrusts to the citizenry also includes the right not only to reject the order from within but to leave it. Whoever does not want to live under the five foundations is not forced to stay. The right to leave is itself a safeguard: an order that one may leave has to convince through what it achieves, and not by bolting the exit. How this right is arranged without becoming a lever for destroying the community is dealt with in the chapter on the world order.