The Governing Principle
§6 Correct, do not direct — the renounced "fourth duty"
The governing principle is a renunciation. Smith gave the state three duties and warned against a fourth — directing the people's capital — as an authority safe in no hands. Axiacracy takes the warning literally: it corrects but does not direct. It sets the price a factor faces and frees the quantity it chooses — prices in, quantities out — so a correction reshapes incentives without ever substituting for them. It is the gardener, not the painter.
Its sovereign lever is Polanyi's: govern the rate, not the direction, of change. Direction — AI capability, technological advance — is largely exogenous and not the state's to veto; the rate at which a society is made to absorb it is what governance can hold. So Axiacracy paces the transition to society's absorption capacity, booking near-term harm as real until compensation is shown, while leaving the market interior and the unsteered zone free to run.
§7 The governing loop
The operating loop is simple to state: sense the Æ-vector; detect where an axis or a cohort has left its band; correct the conditions — a charge, a floor, a ceiling — under general rule; and release, returning to a settled band rather than steering continuously. Corrections are batched and then allowed to settle, because perpetual re-litigation is itself a source of instability.
The hard part is physics, not intent. Delays between a correction and its effect produce oscillation; a high-leverage intervention pushed in the wrong direction does more harm than none. So the loop is damped, its interventions counter-cyclical, and its own frequency watched: a well-set frame trends toward fewer, smaller corrections over time — rising intervention is the signal of a mis-set frame, not of diligence.
§8 Who sets the weights — and how capture is resisted
The weights are set by a vote — the founding line of the whole doctrine. Individual value is subjective; but a democratic vote constitutes value as objective for governance — a declared, binding act of collective self-government, neither a science of the Good nor a dictator's decree. The vote picks general-rule weights, bounded to the ascertained and held under the Charter; it is preferred to any single optimiser not because crowds are wise but because a mistaken electorate is correctable by argument where a mistaken ruler is correctable only by rupture.
Capture is the standing threat, and it is resisted structurally. The corrector is impersonal — every correction is imputed to the published rule, never to a face, and builds no partisans; its officers hold power divorced from private enrichment (a non-transferable ledger). An anti-ruling-class monitor watches for the compute-and-capital owners becoming the new estate whose committee the state is; the value-norms themselves are audited for whether they encode one cohort's interest as the common good; and beneficence is watched as a capture vector, since tyranny hides under a semblance of generous deeds.
§9 Epistemic humility
Axiacracy holds its own instrument lightly. The sensor reads manifest effects, never the generative knowledge behind them; it is a fallible instrument, never a judge of the Good, and it is constitutionally barred from sterilising value by measuring only the demonstrable. It adopts the ancients' teleology — that flourishing is the point — while declining their epistemology: it cultivates the capacity to value and returns the verdict to the vote, rather than auditing souls.
Two guardrails follow. The unsteered zone is a discovery organ, exempt from ex-ante scoring by construction, because a freedom granted only where its effects are already known to be good is no freedom at all — and steering is licit only while a large, heterogeneous unsteered zone survives to falsify the voted weights. And the value-monoculture is self-negating: push any single axis to excess and, like a body grown out of proportion, the whole ceases to function — health is a concord of differences across many axes, so a suspiciously uniform reading is a warning, not a triumph.