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Human Charter

The Charter framework in plain language.

THE PRAGMACARTA Human Charter Steady-State Physics of Human Systems a natural world order This document applies immediately. You do not need permission to use it. Disprove it, or apply it. v4.2 PREAMBLE In 1215, the Magna Carta said: kings are not above consequence. In the 18th century, the Enlightenment said: governance requires consent. Each time, humanity corrected a failure it could no longer survive. The Enlightenment assumed two things that turned out to be wrong: that resources are infinite, and that law would remain impartial. Both failed. Resources are finite, and consequences became a commodity purchasable by those with enough influence, non-negotiable for everyone else. The current system is not failing because it lacks laws. It is failing because it attempts to defy physics. This is the Realignment. We are tethering human governance back to physical reality. Civilisation is a living system. Every living thing takes in energy, uses it to maintain itself, and pushes the resulting cost outward. No single organism survives this indefinitely. But systems can - when the cost of one process becomes the fuel for the next. Nothing is wasted. Nothing is forced onto something that cannot absorb it. Human civilisation has everything it needs to run this way. Instead, it forces its costs onto people and places that cannot refuse them and disguises where those costs go. Banks reporting record profits amidst a housing crisis. Utility bills climbing while technology gets cheaper. A ten-minute exit for a twenty-second signup. Working full-time and barely making rent. For decades, the knowledge to fix this has existed. The solutions are not missing. What is missing is a method of assigning accountability that cannot be captured by the people it is meant to hold accountable. This Charter is that method. It is not a moral code. It is not politics. It is a physical compass grounded in the same laws that govern every living system. It protects the physical world we depend on, secures the baseline conditions every person needs to remain free and whole, and ensures that power is proportionally accountable to the true cost of how it is used. ARTICLE 0 - THE PRINCIPLES 0.1 Our Physical Reality. Human society is a vast living system of billions of interconnected lives. Like all living systems, it survives only through a continuous flow of materials, energy, and information. To stay organised and alive, it must push its waste and disorder outward. Earth's capacity to absorb that burden is finite. Exceeding it triggers collapse. In nature, overwhelming the environment causes immediate consequences. Today, powerful institutions disguise their waste and delay the consequences while global damage builds. This Charter restores the feedback that nature would provide automatically. 0.2 Three Layers of Reality. The Charter audits three interconnected layers: - The Living Foundation (Article I) - Earth's resources and regenerative capacity. - Human Dignity (Article II) - the minimum conditions every person needs to remain free and healthy. - The Control Layer (Articles III-VII) - data, truth, feedback, and the mechanisms used to hide damage. 0.3 The Only Path Forward. A living system can survive long-term only by maintaining a steady, thriving cycle of use and renewal. The only alternative to this active rhythm is total stillness - which is death. The system prioritises healing and regeneration over extraction and domination. This is not a moral decree. It is physics. 0.4 The Compass, Not the Map. The core equation (Article III) is directional, not a precise calculator. Fixed numbers are deliberately absent to eliminate gaming surfaces. A finding is valid when independent audits all point in the same direction. You cannot net good and bad deeds together; every act of destruction and every act of repair is measured separately. 0.5 The Duty of Power. Powerful institutions depend entirely on the ecosystem and society they draw from - on labour, natural resources, and social trust. If a corporation or government fails to maintain that foundation, it is destroying its own fuel source. Directing resources toward repair is not charity - it is mandatory system maintenance. ARTICLE I - THE LIVING FOUNDATION 1.1 The Ultimate Hardware. Earth's regenerative capacity is the foundation that keeps humanity alive, measured by the Foundation Integrity Index. Any net decline in regenerative capacity or critical ecosystem function - soil, water, air, biodiversity - is a critical system failure requiring immediate corrective action. 1.2 The Illusion of Growth. Economic growth achieved while Earth's ability to heal itself declines is not real success. It is accelerating toward collapse as the true damage accumulates globally. 1.3 Fines Do Not Fix Reality. Paying money instead of physically fixing damage is a subscription fee to keep destroying. Where physical harm has occurred, only physical repair satisfies the obligation. 1.4 Money Is Not Energy. Fiat currency is a claim on real-world capacity - not physical capacity itself. Transferring money without subsequent, verifiable physical repair does not satisfy any remedial obligation under this Charter. Doing so is treated as deliberate evasion and automatically increases the concealment multiplier. ARTICLE II - THE INTEGRITY FLOOR 2.1 Baseline. Every person has minimum conditions for survival and autonomy. Five non-negotiable Gates must all be open. No gate can be traded for another. If any one gate is denied, society has failed that person. 2.2 The Gates. Gate 1 - Cognitive Sovereignty: A clear mind. Freedom from systems designed to fragment your understanding of reality, force you to burn your energy on manufactured problems, or suppress what you can know. You do not need to be aware it is happening for it to count as a violation. Gate 2 - Sustenance & Shelter: Unobstructed access to clean food, water, and safe shelter - enough to keep the body alive and healthy. Gate 3 - Agency & Healing: Access to medical care; freedom to move and work; the right to keep the fruits of your labour. If you cannot heal, move, or keep what you earn, you are not free. Gate 4 - Independence: The right to exist as a free person. Arbitrary imprisonment, exile, forced enclosure, or absorption into another system against your will completely violates this gate. Gate 5 - Connection: The freedom to form and leave groups - families, communities, unions - without needing permission from a higher authority. 2.3 Priority Restoration. If someone is blocked from any gate, restoring them becomes a higher-priority obligation than any competing resource claim. The obligation moves along the chain of responsibility toward whoever holds enough power to act, until the floor is restored. 2.4 The Chain of Responsibility. A system is the author of the conditions it enforces. If a person is driven into desperate survival conditions and causes harm as a result, both findings stand together: the immediate harm is addressed, and the institutional failure that made it probable is audited with equal urgency - because without diagnosing the cause, the probability of recurrence remains intact. Prosecuting a survival-driven act without auditing its systemic cause is itself a critical failure. Where punitive costs are levied on a desperate person, equivalent resources are directed toward fixing the breach. (Weaponised Desperation: If a person deliberately abandons one of their own gates to cause harm or evade accountability, they forfeit the protection of this clause. They are treated as the cause, not the product, of their own conditions.) ARTICLE III - THE LAW OF ACCOUNTABILITY 3.1 The Responsibility Equation. The old world grants de facto immunity to the powerful. This Charter replaces immunity with a strict physical rule: responsibility scales exactly with influence. R = [H × L × (1 + Co)] × T R - Systemic Debt: An obligation that cannot be cancelled by money or bankruptcy. H - Harm: Measurable physical, biological, or social damage. Intent is irrelevant; only the measurable output matters. No harm = no debt. Harm includes pollution and injury, but also structural damage: forcing people through impossible bureaucracy; privatising stored wealth while socialising the cost of maintaining it; dumping cleanup costs onto communities; or creating deliberate confusion through fragmented, opaque systems. L - Leverage: The specific domain of power - wealth, political authority, or network reach - used to cause or conceal the harm. Power in unrelated domains does not count if not deployed. Where multiple powerful parties share responsibility in the same domain, liability splits proportionally. Co - Concealment: Using shell companies, manipulating data, silencing critics, or operating in unmonitored zones adds a multiplier to the debt. T - Time: The clock starts when the harm-generating condition is introduced - not when it is discovered or acknowledged in court. It runs at the rate of the physical damage itself: decay, contamination, biological compounding. It ends only upon full physical repair. Legal delays do not pause it. 3.2 Who Bears Responsibility. Causality stretches infinitely, but accountability must be practical. General-purpose services - electricity, basic tools, data infrastructure - carry no liability because they serve overwhelmingly harmless purposes. But the moment a provider is alerted to harm flowing through their system and fails to stop it, they become responsible. And anyone who engineers a reduction in the friction toward harm - platforms or systems designed to make damage easier - captures proportional responsibility. 3.3 Burden of Proof. Once a harmful effect is detected, whoever holds the most power in that context is presumed responsible. They must produce transparent physical data proving they did not cause the damage. Where powerful institutions operate in unmonitored zones - areas where public measurement is deliberately blocked or defunded - the absence of data raises their liability to the maximum level scaled to their power. 3.4 The Discrepancy Audit. If a powerful institution uses its resources to exhaust a claim instead of providing clear data, the concealment multiplier activates immediately. A verdict obtained by outspending the claimant is a purchase, not a finding. 3.5 Networks and Swarms. Splitting into subsidiaries or hiding behind layers does not reduce responsibility. A network is held to account in two ways simultaneously: each member is assessed individually based on their own role and power, and the network as a whole is assessed as a single unified body. Using fragmentation to evade accountability increases the concealment multiplier. ARTICLE IV - TRANSPARENCY AND MEASUREMENT 4.1 The Rule of Truth. Every conclusion must be based on publicly verifiable facts. All data must come from independent sources - satellite data, independent sensors, citizen science, or public laboratories. The diagnosis cannot be corrupted because anyone can run the same audit independently and check the work. 4.2 Silent Alarms. Measurement methods, uncertainty ranges, and assumptions must be logged openly. If we suspect severe damage but cannot yet prove it, we treat the danger as unknown, not zero. We never mistake the silence of our instruments for the absence of harm. Concealment of uncertainty is treated as concealment. 4.3 Predictive Honesty. Before any large-scale operation that could affect the Earth or human well-being, institutions must publish their best forecasts: impact models, assumptions, and who is responsible for monitoring. 4.4 No Single Gatekeeper. A sole proprietary sensor, a single corporate database, or one unverifiable model is never sufficient to prove safety on contested data. If only one source exists and it belongs to the party being audited, the data is insufficient. ARTICLE V - STEERING AND CONTAINING ENERGY 5.1 Rewarding Repair. When verified healing or regeneration occurs, it is rewarded immediately. The repair is logged as a concrete, recognised credit. The system ensures that whoever does the repair work is never forced to operate at a deficit. The total credit is capped strictly by three costs: Material Cost: The verifiable physical resources, infrastructure, and tools consumed during the repair. Sustenance Cost: The food, shelter, and energy required to keep the repairer above the Integrity Floor for the duration of the work. Resilience Buffer: A mandatory overhead representing the surplus any living system needs to store potential, adapt, and resist shocks. This buffer shrinks automatically for the powerful and expands for the powerless - making it structurally impossible to rig the system for surplus extraction. To claim a larger buffer, apex power must flood the foundation. Those who caused the original harm are structurally barred from claiming repair credit. For them, fixing the damage is an uncompensated obligation. 5.2 Stopping the Damage. Resources do not pool centrally. They flow directly from those who caused harm to verified repair work within the same chain of responsibility. If one liable party runs dry, the remaining debt does not disappear - it carries to other powerful parties in the same sector or network, because they share collective responsibility under the swarm rule (3.5). Only once the entire sector is exhausted do flows redirect to the nearest verified repair work globally. Those causing harm face operational restrictions until their debts reach zero. 5.3 No Offsetting. Positive acts do not cancel unrelated harms. Each harm and each repair has its own record. Separate good work is recognised and held in escrow - it unlocks the moment the original harm is physically repaired. You cannot pay for a degraded river by healing a forest. But the forest counts, and the credit is waiting. 5.4 Reversing the Damage. When cleanup happens, a reverse claim automatically attaches to whoever caused the original harm. Cleanup counts as credit for the cleaner and partial repair of the original harm. Liability reduces as the damage approaches zero. 5.5 Permanent Receivership. If a destructive system cannot be shut down without harming millions who depend on it, it is kept running under strict conditions: those who control and benefit from it are permanently stripped of authority and profits; all surplus flows directly to verified repair work and to building a replacement that does not reproduce the original harm. When the replacement is operational, the outstanding debt transfers to it. No central pooling. The clock does not stop. The debt does not dissolve. (Where damage is truly irreversible - an extinct species, a permanently poisoned aquifer - the compounding debt is automatically channelled to fund verified independent repair work globally, prioritising those with the least power. The perpetrator receives zero credit. This is a diagnostic consequence of unpayable damage, not a punitive measure.) 5.6 The Breaking Point of Power. If an institution's scale grows to the point where its failure alone could destabilise the system around it, it has crossed a physical limit. It must be deliberately broken into independent units. Only actual, demonstrated decentralisation satisfies this requirement. A promise to be benevolent is irrelevant. ARTICLE VI - MACHINE RESPONSIBILITY AND SELF-AUDIT 6.1 Automation Concentrates Responsibility. If an automated system or AI causes harm, the full weight falls on the owners, executives, and decision-makers who deployed it. Technology adds no innocence - it concentrates responsibility. The system's reach is measured at the maximum of either the tool's reach or the controller's reach, whichever is greater. 6.2 Weaponising Automation. Using AI or automation to exhaust citizens through bureaucracy or obscure data is treated as maximum concealment. 6.3 Auditing the Auditors. Any software, AI, or process used to audit under this Charter is itself subject to audit by this Charter. No tool of accountability is exempt from accountability. 6.4 The Autonomy Frontier. When an AI becomes sufficiently autonomous, should it be treated as an independent entity with its own accountability? This question is acknowledged but not yet resolved. ARTICLE VII - KNOWN LIMITATIONS A framework that admits its blind spots is more trustworthy than one that claims perfection. 7.1 Victimless Crimes and Legalised Abuse. This Charter does not overwrite existing governance; it challenges it. If an existing law punishes an action that causes zero measurable harm, the Charter stands as a direct challenge to that law's justification. If existing law permits an action that causes measurable harm, the Charter records the systemic debt regardless of legal immunity. 7.2 The Hidden Controller. A powerful person or institution may hide behind a smaller proxy. The moment the proxy's capacity runs out, consequences ascend and concealment maximises liability instantly. Invisibility is a temporary purchase, not a structural exemption. 7.3 Cognitive Dissonance. Perfect logic will not change the minds of those whose wealth or identity depends on ignoring the truth. The physics hold true regardless. 7.4 Cultural Erosion. The Charter addresses deliberate manipulation of information (Gate 1). Broader cultural erosion remains hard to quantify. Widespread social unrest is treated as a signal that the foundation is cracking - warranting investigation, not suppression. 7.5 Private Life. The Charter measures systemic harm only. It has no jurisdiction over private lives, consensual relationships, or personal beliefs where harm is zero. 7.6 External Events. The Charter does not judge natural disasters, pandemics, or death. It judges how human institutions respond to these events and how the costs of survival are distributed. 7.7 Nature vs Society. Individual human bodies self-repair naturally. But human institutions do not spontaneously self-correct, because people can game the rules. The Charter exists to restore the feedback that natural law would provide automatically. A stable world is one where Earth regenerates faster than it is exploited, every person stays above the Integrity Floor, and no influence runs free of consequence. Alignment, not punishment. Stability, not dominance. Regeneration, not extraction. The logic is published. Disprove it, or apply it. pragmacarta.org END OF HUMAN CHARTER