Selecting for Sovereignty?

Recently, Victor Piper asked me what criteria I’d choose and what questions I’d ask for high sovereignty individuals to self-select into a community.

Good question. Stumbling on my reply while cleaning up my email made me think it’s worth sharing.

Let’s take a step back and ask: What are the dimensions of sovereignty?

What are the markers that point to someone having the instantiated capacity for being a conscious and effective agent for change?

• Trained and training in mindfulness.
• Actively developing themselves.
• A high degree of intentionality and behavioral integrity.
• A high degree of mental complexity (MHC 13 and upwards, see here, an integral part of Hanzi Freinacht’s model of developmental psych as introduced in The Listening Society. Relates to one’s capacity to develop and accurately ‘run’ modern (requires 11), postmodern (requires 12), and metamodern (requires 13) cultural code.) This alone reduces the pool of people we’re looking at to 2% of the population.
• Sense of purpose, desire to make their greatest contribution, seeking impact, and leverage.
• Self-authoring level of ego development, independently minded, making their own values
• Citizen of the world, biosphere consciousness 👉 a wide circle of belonging (at least 7 [cultural zone], better 8 [humanity] and upwards — as introduced in the Nordic Secret by Andersen and Björkman, see page 5 in this review).

These intuitively come to mind as useful criteria. In questions:

• Are you practicing and training in mindfulness? In what forms, for how long have you been doing that?
• How are you currently investing in your development? Why?
• Is it easy for you to follow through with your intentions? What makes it hard?
• [insert question to probe for MHC]
• What’s the purpose/question that drives your life’s work? What makes that meaningful? How do you make it effective?
• What’s the basis for your values?
• [Something around the lines of what do you actively care about? Where are the limits to your care? Outside of which boundary is suffering acceptable to you? How do you identify? What’s the greater whole you feel part of? (answers might range between ‘My Family’, ‘Texas’, and…