Mara’s mother Rosa had been twenty-nine when the town by the river became a beacon: the first assembly with members chosen by lot, the first waterworks as a common good, the first winter in which no one was cold. Rosa often talked about the years before, when the cooperatives still stood beside the corporations and the town learned to live without their permission. She also talked about those who had left, and about the lawyer who wanted to buy up people’s plots until no one would sell any more. “We didn’t defeat them,” she said. “We made them unnecessary.”
An order like SOLIS cannot be introduced at the flick of a switch. A society cannot be reprogrammed overnight, all its fears and blockages cannot be argued away, and, this is decisive, such an order cannot be established by force either without betraying its own foundations. An order based on dignity and maturity cannot be installed by a coup. It has to be won through conviction and through the successful example. SOLIS is therefore a long, conscious transformation that requires time, patience, courage, and a culture of learning from mistakes. This chapter describes the path, the people who walk it, the resistance they will meet, the fate of old wealth, and the standards by which one can tell whether the path is still the right one.
The Path from What Exists to SOLIS
The path leads through three phases that interlock. At the beginning stands a change of consciousness, because before structures change, minds and hearts have to move. It takes honest assessments that make visible not only problems but also possibilities, and courageous voices in the media, the arts, science, and everyday life that dare to ask whether we really want to carry on like this. A film that tells the principles of this order, a series of conversations that brings citizens, experts, and activists together, teaching material that lets children talk about the future instead of cramming facts: that is how it begins.
This is followed by the building of beacons, concrete places and projects that show it can be done: towns that switch to a circular economy, enterprises that work according to these principles, schools and research networks that try out new paths. A small town switches its supply to renewable sources, introduces an assembly with citizens chosen by lot, and becomes a model that finds imitators. Such examples inspire, prove that change is practice and not only theory, and create momentum.
Only when enough people are convinced and enough examples hold does the change of the system begin: new legal frameworks, new economic incentives, new institutions. This too does not happen overnight but step by step, with setbacks, accompanied by monitoring and correction. A principle can stand in a constitution and still take years until administration, the economy, and society have internalized it. That is why accompaniment, monitoring, and feedback belong to every step. The transition to SOLIS is thus a project spanning generations, perhaps the greatest humanity has ever undertaken.
The Honest Assessment
Two things must be said clearly here. First, this transition comes with no guarantee, and it meets not only inertia but real resistance. Second, and harder: SOLIS redistributes power and wealth. Whoever holds both concentrated under the existing order, together with the institutions built to protect them, will not be moved by arguments, because what is at stake here is not understanding but interest. A design that assumes the powerful can be persuaded is naive, and SOLIS makes no such assumption. It renounces coercion, but not realism. How it deals with this resistance without betraying itself is the subject of the section on actors and resistance.
Stages of Transformation
The transformation to SOLIS is not a sudden upheaval but a relay race, in which the stages build on one another and reinforce one another. The order is not arbitrary but follows an inner logic. Education comes first, because without the ability to think in complex ways, reflect ethically, and act creatively, every later reform comes to nothing. This education does not begin at university but in early childhood, and it prepares people to be able to shape change at all. It is followed by the economy as the most powerful lever. Incentives shift from short-term profit towards lasting, socially and ecologically sensible economic activity, and a changed culture in enterprises, participation, ethical aims, and responsibility towards society and the planet, takes the place of the pure logic of profit. When the economy changes, the order of power has to follow, so that political and institutional structures carry the change: more transparency, more ethical oversight, more participation, and gradually the bodies of the Ring that this work describes take shape. At the same time, work goes on on the soft factors, on values, stories, and the understanding of success, happiness, and meaning, because in SOLIS a successful person is not the richest but the one who creates something lasting for the community. In the end, a local project becomes a global process that learns from one another, respects differences, and shares common principles.
For this to succeed, it takes road maps that set out stages, priorities, and responsibilities, accompanying educational and cultural programmes that make people participants instead of people affected, pilot projects with clear paths for spreading what has proved itself, and platforms through which knowledge and means are shared. Thus transformation does not become chaos but a conscious process carried jointly.
Actors, Roles, and Resistance
The change to SOLIS does not happen by itself but is carried by people. Three roles stand at the centre. The pioneers are the courageous first ones who try out new ideas, often against the current and at risk: the social entrepreneurs, the municipalities, the teachers, and the artists who live out what at first is only theory and thereby create momentum. The bridge builders are less visible and yet indispensable. They bring together what would otherwise remain separate, citizens and politics, science and the economy, young and old. They translate between worlds and create spaces in which people with different interests work on solutions together. The guardians, finally, watch over ethics and law. Ethics councils, ombudspersons, and platforms for those who expose abuses ensure that the change does not proceed blindly or recklessly, protect the weaker, and hold SOLIS to its own standard.
Not All Resistance Is Alike
Where there is movement, there is resistance, but it is not of one kind. Part of the resistance is a legitimate signal. It shows where people are afraid, where real conflicts of interest exist, or where someone has been overlooked. If a pilot project for sustainable urban development meets protest because rents are rising, that is no reason to abandon it but a sign that social compensation is missing. Such resistance is heard and translated into better solutions. Another part of the resistance, however, is not a signal for improvement but the defence of privileges by those who are losing power and wealth, and it does not dissolve through dialogue, because it does not rest on a misunderstanding. Treating both kinds as the same is the naivety on which great designs have failed. SOLIS distinguishes them and meets each in its own way. Not everyone will be convinced, and not everyone will come along. But everyone receives the opportunity to be heard and respected.
Building in Parallel instead of Asking Permission
Because the powerful will not give up their power, SOLIS does not wait for their consent. Its strategy is not to conquer the existing centres of power. It is to build parallel structures that simply work better, cooperative enterprises, supply from common goods, assemblies with citizens chosen by lot, open knowledge networks, and resilient, broadly based supply chains, and to let them grow until they overtake and absorb the old structures. The transition is thus won less by conquest than by obsolescence. Where the new order simply serves people better, the old one loses its hold. This is not a detour but the real path, because it does without the coercion that SOLIS rejects and founds the new order on what it achieves instead of on what it conquers.
The Dangers Named
This path can fail, and naming the dangers is itself a protection against them. The first is capture: that the new institutions are taken over by the very interests they were meant to replace. It is countered by the order of power, sortition, rotation, and the right of recall, which make lasting appropriation mechanically difficult. The second is economic strangulation: that an island of SOLIS, embedded in a hostile market, is starved or undercut. It is countered by the controlled membrane of the border and by building resilient, connected, and cooperative structures instead of isolated individual attempts. The third is hollowing out: that the language of SOLIS is adopted but its substance hollowed out. It is countered by the measurable monitoring of fundamental rights and by the maturity of citizens, which lets them recognize the hollowing out. The fourth is relapse: that the order erodes over time. It is countered by deep civic education and by the structural impossibility of ossification. A society that pays attention to these dangers is far harder to defeat by them.
No Coercion, but Defence
Finally, there is a distinction that matters. SOLIS renounces attack and establishing itself by force. It is not installed through an overthrow and does not compel the unwilling. But renouncing coercion does not mean renouncing defence. A society that has built something just is not obliged to let it be destroyed, sabotaged, or hijacked in the name of tolerance. The line runs as in the chapter on security: attack is forbidden, defence is legitimate. SOLIS protects what it builds against those who want to tear it down, without itself becoming the aggressor it rejects.
What Becomes of Old Wealth
The hardest question of the transition is the one about what already exists: the millionaire’s house, the corporation’s capital, the plot of land that has belonged to a family for three generations, the loan a craftsman has taken out from a bank. A design that avoids it remains a sketch. SOLIS answers it with one principle and four rules. The principle is this: nothing is taken because someone has it, but nothing remains power just because it was once power. The transition does not expropriate but disempowers, and it does so where a citizenry has adopted the order, never from outside and never overnight.
The first rule concerns personal possessions. The house someone lives in, the workshop they run, the land a family farms remain theirs, as property or as a permanent right of use where the land itself becomes a common good. Whoever can no longer sell the land can still build on it, live on it, and pass it on to their children. The second rule concerns monetary wealth. It is exchanged into value points at a public rate, up to the threshold of provision. What lies above it is not lost, but it is transformed: into shares in the productive fund, which secure the former owner a return in value points for life, but no vote, no power of disposal, and no sale. Wealth is recognized as a claim to a good life and dissolved as a lever over others. The third rule concerns companies. They become enterprises. The employees become participants, the management becomes an office held for a term, and the previous owners receive fund shares for their capital under the same rule as everyone else. Machines, buildings, and knowledge stay where they are needed, in the enterprise. The fourth rule concerns debts. Debts between people and enterprises within the order are settled in value points up to a fair limit and are extinguished beyond it, because an order without interest cannot carry on interest-bearing debts. Debts to the outside world remain what they are and are serviced through the membrane as far as possible, so that the new order does not begin as a cheat.
These rules apply in phases, like the provision for old age: with a long period in which both systems run side by side, and with guaranteed minimums for those who planned their lives under the old order. And they apply together with the right to leave for anyone who would rather be rich than ringed. Whoever leaves takes along what they can carry and leaves behind what belongs to the order: the land, the water, the power. Thus the transition becomes neither a robbery nor a capitulation to what exists. It is the translation of old wealth into a language in which it no longer rules anyone.
Communication and Persuasion
No idea, however good, lives without communication, because people have to understand what it is about, feel that it concerns them, and see that they can take part. In SOLIS, communication is therefore not an appendage and not an advertising machine, but a heart of the transformation. It connects, explains, inspires, and moves.
Above all, it explains not only what is happening but why. Too often today, reforms are pushed through and laws passed without people grasping their meaning, which feeds mistrust and withdrawal. SOLIS therefore always also answers the questions about what for and why. When a town switches to renewable energy, it is not only the technical details that are communicated. It is explained why this change is necessary, what it means in the long term, and what role each individual plays. This communication is addressed to everyone and not only to elites, to the woman worker, the young person, the pensioner, and the single mother as much as to the businesswoman, in clear, respectful language and without the jargon of experts. It uses every channel, from classic media through digital ones to local events and the means of art. A change in a town therefore does not begin with an administrative decree but equally with a festival of music, conversation, and shared experience.
What is decisive, finally, is that communication takes the form of dialogue and does not run from the top down. It is not about proclaiming messages but about creating spaces in which questions can be asked, doubts voiced, and proposals made. In them, those responsible speak with the population and not about it, openly also about mistakes and uncertainties, without back rooms and without secrecy. A new law is therefore not only explained. There is an open phase in which citizens ask questions, help shape it, and voice concerns. Thus a society arises that does not suffer change but carries it together.
International Spread and Adaptation
SOLIS is not a finished template to be laid over the world, because every society has its own history, its own symbols, and its own resources, strengths, and wounds. It therefore does not see itself as an export product but as an open, adaptable model. It offers foundations and an ethical framework, but the concrete form arises locally. The five foundations remain the same everywhere. They form the backbone, which is not negotiable. What differs is the how. Which institutions are built, which paths are chosen, and which symbols and rituals carry the system depend on the society concerned. In an Indigenous community, the protection of traditional knowledge systems stands at the centre, in a post-industrial conurbation social and technical invention, in a region scarred by war first the building of resilience, before the bodies of the Ring arise. Thus every society fills the framework with its own reality instead of having a foreign model imposed on it.
So that SOLIS does not break up into isolated islands, networks connect the individual paths. Through them knowledge is shared: which approaches have proved themselves, where there were setbacks, and what can be learned from them. Means are distributed so that poorer regions also receive the same opportunities, and standards are coordinated, so that the ecological and human rights principles apply everywhere, even where they are implemented differently. A network of communities that live according to SOLIS exchanges experience on every continent, carries out joint projects, and shares lessons without levelling local particularities. How a world order arises from many such orders without a ruler emerging above it is set out in the following chapter.
By What the Path Can Be Measured
An order that bears its name but has lost its substance is the third of the dangers named, and only one thing helps against it: standards by which one can check at any time whether a project is still SOLIS or only called so. They are simple, and anyone can apply them. Is basic provision secured for everyone, and does the monitoring of fundamental rights measure how they are honoured in everyday life? Does every body that exercises power have a part filled by lot, a limit on terms of office, and a right of recall? Are decisions, flows of money, and exertions of influence open to inspection, and is the life of the individual at the same time protected by privacy? Is it impossible for anyone to accumulate value points beyond the threshold, is the quantity of points a public figure, and is capital allocated through several independent routes? Are ecological costs included in every price, and does the community take less from the planet than it gives back? Does education teach people to question the order itself, and is criticism of it expressly protected? May those who do not want to stay leave?
Wherever one of these questions has to be answered with no, the path has been abandoned, however much it may still sound like SOLIS. Wherever all of them can be answered with yes, it is SOLIS, however different it may look from this book. For what makes this order is not its form but what it secures: a power that belongs to no one, a prosperity that excludes no one, a planet that stays habitable, and a human being who is free to examine all of this.