The System › Part III · The Governing Principle
Who sets the weights, and how capture is resisted
Citizens set the public weights, the founding line of the doctrine. Individual value is subjective; a democratic vote creates a binding public instruction without claiming to discover the Good. Effects are measured only where evidence supports measurement, and every result carries a method, confidence bound, provenance, and route to challenge.
An independent standards body authors measurement schemas under published evidence and calibration rules. A randomly selected citizen jury may ratify or reject each material schema change, but does not secretly write it. Every version, benchmark, confidence threshold, dissent, audit, and appeal is public; no governance-relevant signal may be bought with transferable money. The corrector remains impersonal and separate from schema authorship, while anti-capture review tests whether compute-and-capital owners or any cohort have encoded private interests as the common good.
What it means
This § answers two different questions. Who decides what matters? Citizens vote the relative public weights of the axes; no formula decides whether a clean river matters more than factory output. Who defines how effects are measured? An independent standards body authors schemas under published evidence and calibration rules, and a randomly selected citizen jury may ratify or reject each material change without secretly writing it. Every schema version, benchmark, confidence threshold, dissent, audit, and appeal is public. Effects are measured where evidence supports measurement; uncertainty lowers the permitted strength of intervention. The corrector applies these public inputs but authors neither the values nor the instrument it executes.
Why Axiacracy needs it
Because "govern by value" collapses instantly into either technocracy ("experts will compute what matters") or mob rule ("vote on everything, including the facts") unless someone draws the line precisely. This § exists to make value objective-for-governance, a binding, legitimate collective choice, without a philosopher-king claiming to know the Good and without a majority voting on what is true.
Compared with other approaches
Against Plato's philosopher-king, who would have the wise know the Good and rule by it, refused: legitimacy is not knowledge (Plato). Against Mises, who says there is no actionable collective value, answered: a declared vote over effects counted under published, challengeable methods is both (Mises). Against raw majoritarianism and its cousin futarchy ("vote values, bet beliefs"), whose instinct, separate the valuing from the measuring, Axiacracy shares but binds under a Charter. The qualifier is Confucius's: it is the people restrained by law who are trusted (Confucius). What bounds the vote is the Charter, §16.