The Priceless Order – Sam Lowenstein

Institutions for protecting what cannot be adequately measured, instrumentalised or optimised.

An Invitation

The central claim of the Priceless Order is one of institutional asymmetry.

Human beings inhabit at least two domains of value.

In one, ‘more’ and ‘less’ make sense. £20 is twice £10. 20 houses is more than 10. An intervention saving 100 lives is, other things being equal, better than one saving 50.

This is the place of efficiency, optimisation, and scale. The utility-based realm of the Machine. The home of the Priced Order.

The other does not behave this way. It cannot accurately be said whether I love my fiancée 13% more this year. Tchaikovsky isn’t verifiably 4.7 times as beautiful as my little brother’s drawing. The value of becoming a parent isn’t objectively captured by aggregating the underlying positive experiences and subtracting the negative ones. These things do not represent immeasurably large quantities of utility. Their value is not exhausted by measurement, not commensurable on a single scale, and is often altered by treating them principally as optimisation targets. They are different kinds of phenomena.

This is the place of meaning, presence, and depth. The not adequately measurable and immeasurable realm of the Living. The home of the Priceless Order.

The Priced Order’s philosophy is centrally concerned with measurement, instrumentalisation, aggregation, and optimisation of phenomena. The Priceless Order’s philosophy revolves around the recognition of some phenomena as intrinsic, relational, incommensurable, and inherently - rather than only functionally - plural.

For thousands of years, priceless phenomena and their associated orders had formed the contours of our civilisational goals. Somewhere along the course of human history, the arrangement of the role of the Priced Order as a tool to achieve priceless goals, and the Priceless Order as the torchbearer of those goals was changed. I believe that humanity set off on this path, probably most initially either around the 16th century birth of Protestantism (Weber) or the 19th century birth of the market society (Polanyi), believing that increasingly sophisticated conceptions of the Priced Order could best nurture and expand the dominion of priceless phenomena.

Things did not go to plan. The Priceless Order became ever more unprotected by a lack of constant upgrading to its institutional representation. The Priced Order increasingly spilled beyond its jurisdictional gates and transformed, over time, from the servant into the master. As a result, the Priced Order and its fundamental conceptions rose to form our civilisation’s ultimate, most normatively conceived set of goals. Its applied reach is now near totalising, spanning individualist political theory and corporate management economics, to the loss of extended family local living arrangements, surveillance capitalist algorithms, and directionality towards engineering fully autonomous artificial general intelligence systems, to name but a few examples. Progress and optimisation are now commonly pursued for their own sakes: the goal is to ensure the system is running as perfectly as possible and the underlying mathematics serves as judge, jury, and executioner. Now in exile, the remnants of the Priceless Order exist in quiet solitude.

Modern civilisation has built extraordinarily powerful institutions for building, distributing, and preserving the Priced Order - measuring, pricing, producing, scaling - while allowing the institutions that perceive, protect and cultivate not adequately measurable and immeasurable value to stall, atrophy, and collapse.

The definition of institution I adopt here is a well-established organisation, social custom, or formal rule that shapes human behaviour, society, and civilisation. By not adequately measurable or immeasurable, and not adequately made instrumentable or optimisable, I mean that when we attempt to experience, interact with, understand, or organise and control priceless phenomena through those lenses, we often end up disregarding, disempowering, and disvaluing the phenomena.

This institutional asymmetry is producing a civilisation ever more capable of optimising what can be measured while progressively eroding our capacity to recognise, protect, and organise around what makes life worth living.

The consequences of the institutional asymmetry are stark and wide-ranging. Children are being educated towards credentials rather than authentic self formation, cities are being engineered for land value and throughput rather than belonging and beauty, attention markets are monetising the conditions of consciousness, elderly care is efficiently delivering bodily maintenance while eliminating relationships, AI is increasingly substituting for rather than deepening human acts of creation, intimacy, and judgement, generations are growing up without a single person they call a best friend or any sense of real community, arts pursuits are being subjugated and folded into scientific pursuits en masse. The list goes on.

Indeed, an entire global culture is emerging around pragmatic ‘what’ and ‘how’ questions, while visionary ‘why’ questions have become fringe and exceptional to the point that people do not truly believe, on the whole, that things will or even can, be better. Adam Curtis describes this status quo as the result of the emergence of a global system that is perceived as too complex for visionary change, particularly by human-led interventions such as international diplomacy, instead requiring data-driven systematic risk management to spot and address problems before they destroy us.

The all-encompassing presence of Priced Order philosophy keeps us focused on preventing the worst from happening, while the lack of a loud and clear presence of Priceless order philosophy ensures that we spend little to no time considering and acting on the belief that something better is really possible.

This paper calls for the birth, or rebirth depending on one’s point of view, of a complementary Priceless Order centred on those things that cannot adequately be reduced to utility value: meaning, dignity, beauty, love, belonging, spiritual depth, craftsmanship, place, nature, contemplation, and the sacred. This would amount to the re-enlivening, and power entrusting, of a decaying, dormant, and depressed set of values around the importance of priceless phenomena. If this order is to stand strong beneath the superstructure of human civilisation, like the sturdy pillars of the Parthenon it will need to be constructed of a strong and enduring fabric: new institutions.

Imagine a civilisation in which we devoted as much ingenuity, ambition, and institutional power to the cultivation of beautiful human lives as we do to the production of material prosperity.

Imagine walking through a city in that civilisation.

Its streets are not merely efficient routes between economically productive destinations, but beautiful places in which people want to linger. Its neighbourhoods are more than collections of properties occupied by strangers. They have shared spaces, traditions, gardens, workshops, places of celebration, and are supported by people whose very profession is to cultivate the relationships and common undertakings through which communities come alive. Someone arriving alone, a newcomer in this city, need not rely on luck to discover friendship, belonging, and a sense of purpose. There would be institutions designed to help them take root, without prescribing what form that rootedness should take.

Its schools do not merely prepare children to compete successfully in the economy. They help them discover what they love, what they are capable of, and what kind of people they might become. Young people encounter great art, philosophy, nature, craftsmanship, and other aspects of the extraordinary variety of human experience. Their education cultivates curiosity, judgement, character, and the confidence to develop their own understanding of a worthwhile life. Teachers are afforded the time, freedom, and prestige appropriate to one of civilisation’s most important professions.

Its older generations are not quietly separated from society when their economic productivity diminishes. Their experience, knowledge, and presence remain woven into the lives of younger people. Care is organised not only around physical safety and medical outcomes, but around dignity, affection, contribution, and enduring relationships. Growing old here does not mean becoming progressively less relevant to the world, rather it means community leadership, wisdom transfer, nurturing, and togetherness.

Its technologies are as extraordinary as they are wisely applied. Artificial intelligence liberates people from drudgery, widens access to knowledge, and helps us solve previously intractable problems. Importantly, its development is guided by a rich and plural account of what human beings are for. Consequently, AI and other powerful technologies help people become better creators rather than merely more prolific consumers of generated content; more deeply connected rather than more constantly connected; more capable of exercising judgement rather than increasingly relieved of the need to do so.

Imagine the people who build and sustain this city, in this civilisation. Some devote their talents to founding great companies, advancing science, and creating material abundance. Others build institutions of belonging, nurture beautiful places, develop practices of contemplation, revive craftsmanship, strengthen families, or help people find meaning in their lives. These are not marginal pursuits left to volunteers, charities, or the independently wealthy. They are serious, respected fields of human endeavour, supported by capital, research, professional communities, public organisations, and other enduring vessels. Generations of ambitious young people aspire to become great builders of human flourishing and bastions of priceless phenomena, with the same seriousness with which previous generations aspired to become industrialists, financiers, or technologists.

The civilisation in which this city is located would not be a uniform one. Its communities would differ, its inhabitants would disagree about their conceptions of the good life: many of its finest developments, evolving on top of foundational and reinvigorating priceless infrastructure would emerge spontaneously, without central direction. The purpose of its core institutions would not be to engineer happiness or impose an official conception of virtue. It would be to give people more genuine opportunities, relationships, places, practices, and freedoms through which to pursue the things they find intrinsically worthwhile.

This is not a vision of a world without markets, technology, ambition, competition, or material forms of progress. Nor would it be a nostalgic return to an imagined golden age. It is a vision of what might become possible if the immense productive and intellectual powers humanity has developed and accumulated over thousands of years, and synthesised most visibly in modern times, were complemented by institutions equally ambitious about the ends those powers should serve.

I believe that delivering the Priceless Order for our modern world has become a historically urgent call to action. For most of human history, our struggle to secure the material means of existence placed profound constraints on the time, attention, and resources we could devote to other human ends. Yet, we may now be entering an era in which AI, robotics, and other emerging technologies radically expand our ability to produce material abundance.

This could represent an extraordinary opportunity to develop the Priceless Order. It may become possible to liberate human energy, on an unprecedented scale, from the necessities of production and survival and direct it towards the cultivation of relationships, beauty, knowledge, wisdom, and meaning.

But there is nothing inevitable about that outcome.

The institutions through which we develop and deploy these technologies will determine whether new capabilities principally deepen human experience or substitute for it. They will determine whether abundance liberates us to pursue richer lives, or merely accelerates our participation in increasingly Huxley-an systems of consumption and optimisation.

The question is therefore not simply whether we can build a more abundant future. It is whether we can build the institutions necessary to make abundance serve the things that make life worth living.

What distinguishes the Priceless Order from other civilisational projects, such as climate action, AI safety, economic justice, public health, or even human flourishing, is that its fundamental call to action is not around which problem to solve. Rather, the Priceless Order asks us to consider which kinds of value our civilisation is capable of recognising and serving.

The Priceless Order is therefore a meta-civilisation project: it is concerned with correcting an imbalance in the underlying architecture through which our civilisation decides what matters.

Its defining ambition is to ensure that the ‘why’ question progress itself asks of us is not a void filled by imposters that are merely available, convenient, and thereby likely to lack the enrichment of the totality of human experience. Instead, it seeks to hold up and embody the things that are most precious of all - the ones that make life worth living - in a way that they may once again become our civilisational guiding light. We are building something enormous and have given it great and increasing speed. Now, let’s give it a rudder of similar ambition.

I believe that building new institutions for the Priceless Order is the most ambitious thing that can be worked on at this juncture in human history. Perhaps I can convince you to join me.

An Analysis

The Priced Order has extraordinarily mature institutions and related infrastructure underpinning the utility-based domain of human experience. It has conventions and concepts, university pathways, prestigious careers, ministries, firms, capital networks and markets, metrics, professional qualifications, journals, and powerful technologies. GDP, markets, accounting, economics, management science, KPIs, cost-benefit analyses, algorithms, and the birth of AI are all its progeny.

There are many deeply understandable reasons for the establishment of this empire. The Priced Order is not a fundamental error, but a grand bargain. A necessary abstraction. Humans generally struggle to reason about inherently plural sources of value, so our civilisation stood up society-wide scaffolding to help us gesture towards value plurality by refracting those gestures through a more reductive, simplified prism. The rainbow produced is a template of a fungible, abstracted system which has the necessary scales and spectrums to gesture across a near infinite multiplicity of values. What we have therefore produced, in the Priced Order, is possibly not just one abstracted system but perhaps an enormous number, which we apply in different ways at different times.

Despite this large number of abstracted systems, they seem to be representative of an underlying functional, rather than inherent, plurality. Functionality here means that the way the underlying plural values are represented by Priced Order systems depends on the way that system chooses to apply the value - an intervention, a translation, a change. For instance, delivering more utility may mean a Happiness Index going up, rather than GDP. Increasing societal wealth may mean more financial freedom, than security and comfort. In contrast, the normative stance and thereby a valuable contribution, of the Priceless Order would not be to apply those underlying plural values that are of immediate interest or perceived usefulness, but to make space for them - an emergence, a recognition, an experience.

Capitalist liberalism is, in many ways, the departure point for our civilisation’s ability to think more helpfully and pluralistically about value. I therefore do not suggest that all priced phenomena are exactly the same type of value in an absolute sense, rather that they draw from a common substrate that seems to make measurement, instrumentalisation, and optimisation of them - from corporate earnings to population level life expectancies - more likely to be adequate.

This is a good thing. With its institutional backing, the Priced Order has cured diseases, fed billions, created modern sanitation, invented contract law, birthed logistics, inspired modern scientific discovery, produced cheap energy, organised capital markets, invented flight, manufactured computation and, ultimately, engineered an outstanding reduction in material deprivation.

The Priced Order’s jurisdictional expansion partly originated from solid scientific bases, rather than mere happenstance. The study of revealed preferences shows that even for those things which we would struggle to consciously assign a utility function as individuals, one can often be inferred from an observation of our behaviour. For instance, I may not believe it is possible to conclude, myself, whether I love my fiancée 13% more this year. However, if I recorded all the actions I or a third party observer believe constituted the recordable manifestations of me ‘loving my fiancée’, and compared these datapoints year to year, we might be able to establish statistical trends. Big data of the individual, if you will. Measurement of utility functions also often appears to become more insightful the more aggregate you go, as you zoom out to a population level. An example of this might be how much utility people get out of listening to Tchaikovsky. At the individual level, a person may choose what song to listen to next by the equivalent of throwing a dart randomly at a dart board: hitting shuffle. But, zoomed out to the scale of a society’s worth of listeners, we may be able to show that 2.67 times out of every 1000 songs, people tend to listen to Tchaikovsky. Big data of the society, if you will.

The Priced Order therefore does not only have value in giving home to what is absolutely measurable, but also what is near or proxy measurable, expanding its sphere of influence into the orbit of the Priceless Order. Positively construed, this provides some form of attention, recognition, and contribution to priceless phenomena. Few utilitarians, consequentialists, and others who have given their lives to the raising and maintaining of the Priced Order do not believe, at some level, in priceless phenomena such as love, spirituality, and community.

The Priced Order, though not perfect, is therefore a good proxy for those things we care about beyond mere abstracted representations of pluralist values. Tyler Cowen’s ‘Stubborn Attachments’, for instance, describes maximising sustainable economic growth as the only truly universal moral imperative.

But what if even sustainability, as an applied aspect of a broader fundamental proxy exercise, cannot fully reconcile priceless phenomena and therefore inevitably forgets (e.g. the lack of directly addressed priceless phenomena in the UN Sustainable Development Goals) or corrupts (e.g. community or nature encapsulated as an asset, such as the concepts of ‘social’ or ‘natural capital’) them.

This paper does not call for the Priced Order’s defeat, tearing down, or revolutionary overthrow; rather, it envisages a jurisdictional resettlement.

Utility-based reason is a wondrous servant and a disastrous sovereign. Economics should decide how efficiently to accomplish an end, but should not automatically decide which ends are worth having. Technology can open possibilities, but it cannot by itself tell us whether we should pursue them. Metrics can illuminate reality, but they cannot make any normative claim. AI may become the greatest optimisation tool humanity has ever constructed, but no instrument of optimisation can determine its own ultimate ends merely by becoming better at optimisation. So, in a time where our cultural zeitgeist appears to be to hold out for future more capable technologies which can answer our most fundamental empirical, technical and normative questions, is it a surprise that the Priced Order is being allowed to overreach. This overreach primarily takes the form of a lack of worthy institutional counterbalance.

The Priceless Order has no comparably coherent and power-entrusted modern institutional design, at the civilisational level, protecting and cultivating beauty, meaning, dignity, belonging, wisdom, love, contemplation, spirituality, craftsmanship, connection with nature, and ultimately an intrinsic rather than instrumental relationship with all things. In identifying priceless phenomena, as is the case with priced phenomena, the claim is not that all such priceless phenomena are alike or even interchangeable and fungible, but rather that they have a common substrate: they cannot be adequately measured, instrumentalised, or optimised.

It is important to recognise existing institutions that attempt to nurture or are in some way formed in the image of priceless phenomena. Examples include aspects of government, the family, moonshot scientific research, religious institutions, facets of universities, museums, civic associations, libraries, national heritage organisations and foundations, teams and clubs and other vestiges or adaptations of community. These have, lamentably, almost universally been weakened or in the process of being dismantled for their role, however large or small, as bastions of the priceless. This is, in short, because they lack sufficient coordination, resources, shared purpose and, ultimately, institutional power and representation to stem the tide.

The claim here is also not that these institutions have problems in general or in the abstract and therefore that we should simply improve them or get new ones. Rather, they have a specific set of issues around the dormancy, decay, and depression of the expression of priceless values within them, and that this is not the worldly trajectory we would want to go on because of its negative civilisational impacts.

We can observe the results of the institutional imbalance in our civilisation.

In our neighbourhoods, people may deeply desire friendship, belonging, and participation in a shared life. Yet the institutions that reliably cultivate these things - teams and clubs, places of worship, community centres for instance - are often weaker, as observed through the time people spend at them, financial investment in them, number of them and so on, in constructing the fabric of that neighbourhood than the systems through which people, for example, purchase accommodation, transport themselves, or consume food and entertainment.

In elderly care, the measurable requirements of safety, nutrition, medication, and physical maintenance are essential. But systems delivering these outcomes are leaving elderly people deprived of intimacy, significance, and intergenerational belonging. We are becoming increasingly good at maintaining life while neglecting many of the things for which life is maintained.

In education, qualifications, examinations, and employment outcomes serve valuable purposes. But as education institutions have become more and more principally rewarded for these measurable outputs, the subordination of the less quantifiable work of cultivating judgement, curiosity, moral character, and the capacity to live life meaningfully has become inevitable.

These are not identical problem domains. Each has its own history and complications. But, as anecdotes, they suggest a recurring institutional failure: human beings value certain incommensurable and intrinsically valuable experiences and relationships deeply, yet we don’t have the institutions in place to champion aligned outcomes.

This is the opportunity I want us to investigate and ultimately contribute to. Not simply the lamentation of the erosion of priceless phenomena, but to discover where its institutional representation is missing, why existing structures fail to sustain it, and how better institutions might be brought into existence.

The inadequacy of measurement does not, by itself, establish the need for new institutions. That need arises where existing institutional functions repeatedly subordinate a valued activity to objectives that distort it.

Let’s, again, consider an elderly care organisation. Recording visits and medical outcomes matters, but those measures should not consistently substitute for enduring relationships. Protecting those relationships may require continuity of carers, funding that supports time spent in the company of others, residents’ testimony carrying authority alongside performance data, amongst other more granular approaches. These arrangements can come in the form of improving existing organisations or in the form of creating new ones. They illustrate what a complementary institutional order means: giving certain human purposes durable resources and decision-making power, rather than leaving them dependent on goodwill within systems organised around or primarily amenable to other ends.

To explore a little deeper on causality, there are a number of potentially convincing reasons why the erosion of priceless phenomena has happened.

Religion once supplied a great deal, but certainly not all, of the institutional infrastructure. An account of the good life was embodied and empowered by metaphysics, rituals, calendars, prohibitions, sacred places, moral formation, community, rites of passage etc. In the Judeo-Christian tradition this was, for the longest time, encapsulated by the once radical proposition that human beings are ‘made in the image of God’. In other words, they are not reducible to their productive usefulness.

This is not to say that there was some time where religious institutions provided a complete escape from the Priced Order, or some uniquely direct form of contact with more plural, indeterminate forms of value. In Christian ethics, for example, there has been a long held tendency towards extreme reductivism, such as Calvinists viewing wealth as the index of your predestination.

Religion has, however, often represented the conscious attempt and an attention exercise directed towards questions of pluralistic value. Though often waylaid in Priced Order calculus, religion’s constant, recurring reminder of the existence of fundamental pluralistic value, and the bringing of that value to the daily, experiential surface, directed energy towards questions, that became insights, that became actions, that became behaviours, that became culture, that became institutions, that became civilisation. It did this by removing us from a universalisation of contractualism, whereby everything in life becomes about trading and dealmaking; ultimately, a commodification of human relationships themselves. In a hyper liberal individualist world, religion becomes mere downside protection for when things go wrong. But what such a world never conceptualised, which religion did, was what matters to humans most. More than trades and deals, humans care about those relationships and connections with others that occur almost at random or that we did not choose - a friend made walking up a hill or our relationship with our siblings. These kinds of relationships allow us, but for a moment, to experience the transcendental: a force greater than our own wants and desires, that we cannot control, that is mediated through the lifelong fonts of mystery, sacrifice, and commitment. As religion has dwindled, modernity has therefore philosophically drifted back to some form of contractualism, which seems little to no reason to nurture priceless phenomena.

Modernity has therefore had no incentive to upgrade or invent institutions concerned with the priceless, weakening much of the architecture that previously directed attention towards it.

The Priced Order itself may well also have added to this demise.

On intellectual grounds, effectively portraying the Priceless Order as mere excess - a result of gross, untamed instincts - arguably helped to quash interest in establishing the latter formally within the walls of modern institutions. These actions have their intellectual roots in the second half of the 20th Century. Randian West Coast egosim which, from Price and Davidson, and Greenspan to Dawkins, encouraged the ‘gifted children’, rejected from typical ‘cool groups’ in their youth, to question God and associated concepts. This questioning translated, from its basis as a new Western tradition, to a civilisation-wide consideration and implementation of individualism, free markets, and machine-based conceptions of everything from ecology to human-socio-political governance systems. Though Nietzsche had declared God dead some 100 years previously, the modern manifestations of the Priced Order have become bent on ensuring the funeral procession is cut short.

On more pragmatic grounds, the Priced Order can be observed crowding out the Priceless Order. Relevant mechanisms are a vast array that reward quantifiable inputs and outputs, from capital allocation and metrics-based accountability, to professional qualifications, analytical policy making and likes on social media. Furthermore, Priced Order overreach means that general engagement with the Priceless Order is often predicated on Priced Order success or failure. A simple example is that in a world where the Priced Order begins to fail and a consequence of this is the creation of a rampant inequality where most people’s basic economic needs become at risk, attention for similar basic level needs - adopting critiques of a strictly vertical Maslowian hierarchy of needs - on the Priceless side, such as social connection, are readily left by the wayside.

Ironically, the Priced Order’s latest obsession with its own Randian self-sufficiency reveals a symbiotic-type weakness at its core. The Priced Order needs the Priceless Order to make sense of itself.

In centuries past, for example, patron systems put wealth into cathedrals, mosques, synagogues, art, libraries, and other physical manifestations of the attempted common good. In the post-war years the Apollo missions, channelling 4-5 percentage points of American federal spending, were underwritten by scientists, engineers, and other technologist dreamers, many of whom had a profound belief in God. Today’s push to the frontier, the bleeding edge of Priced Order operations, looks very different: very rich individuals and organisations often having no idea what to do with all their wealth. Consequently, they hoard it, reinvest it in themselves, or use it to try to influence a certain Priced Order directionality, rather than allocating it to standing up institutions to preserve the priceless.

Further, the recent reinvigoration of the Californian Ideology, notably by leading technology oligopolists are, as at the time of the philosophy’s conception, a symptom of opportunism in a civilisation that is rapidly losing trust in state-based institutions to deliver the good life (hence responses around a ‘liberalism that builds’ from commentators like Ezra Klein). Seeing no ‘third way’ - as that implies anarchy because there is no formalised discussion of the Priceless Order - the civilisation chooses the decentralised, network-based order offered by the elites that sells the masses notions of freedom, authenticity and self-expression, autonomy and self governance. The sales pitch is successful, because it runs on the most fundamental value proposition of the Priced Order: a proxy, here a gateway, to the priceless. If people have more time, more control, and are more ‘themselves’, they may then be able to identify and interact with those things that make life worth living. Simultaneously, and covertly, market forces are allowed to run riot, elitist power structures are embedded, and a gradual disempowerment of citizens takes hold. Paradoxically, the same citizens that were sold on a version of the Californian Ideology then increasingly come to believe that they are being subjugated by societal forces they cannot control and, slowly but surely, give up trying to make their own lives, or the lives of others, better.

The malaise and rot this threatens to create is an opportunity being seized upon by various civilisational scale ‘impact’ movements.

These ‘impact’ movements, from Effective Altruism to Rutger Bregman’s Moral Ambition, though noble and energetic, are not likely to achieve the counterbalance of the Priced and Priceless Orders because they are often, structurally speaking, vassals of the Priced Order. They are normally too implanted within the deeper Priced Order outcome-focused and end-to-end engineering grammar of ‘identify objective -> quantify -> optimise -> scale’, and thereby concentrate on Priced Order-legible ‘neglected problems’ rather than a fundamental, novel theory of value and correspondingly novel delivery theory. As with the literal names of sub-movements like Less Wrong, through focusing on activities of the Priced Order itself they aim to help citizens and other civilisational actors carry out fewer of a subset of Priced Order phenomena that are considered bad. They thereby attempt to restrict, change, and add to the types of activity the Priced Order is conducting. This can often be worthy, morally sophisticated work dedicated to meaningful causes like AI alignment, ending factory farming, reducing smoking, eradicating malaria, and preventing nuclear warfare. I am happy these movements exist and believe they may make defining and positive contributions to our civilisation. I simultaneously reject the premise that their contribution is complete from a steering perspective. The movements’ activity boundaries notably fall where rationalism intellectual theories are lacklustre: principally, around what it is like to be a particular human being. Rationalist movements’ concerns are thus almost solely with observed happenings in the world at macro that seem particularly important, the trajectories and timelines of these happenings, and what would be appropriate pragmatic responses. They are therefore interested in existing conceptions of Priced Order philosophy - systemic stability - and so are embattled in competition with other Priced Order-focused actors on the correct technical method to achieve this. So, the philosophical and phenomenological space outside of the Priced Order - the realm of the Priceless Order - is resultantly more neglected because brilliant minds who could be thinking and doing something about priceless phenomena spend all their time thinking about priced phenomena.

So why are Priced Order-focused ‘impact’ movements seemingly unable to champion the kind of phenomena found in the Priceless Order? The ‘impact’ movements, like their spiritual guide the Priced Order, require phenomena to be rendered as comparable variables within an optimisation function. It is possible to say ‘there are x number of nuclear weapons in the world, but unlike you I think we should have y number’. Contrastingly, priceless phenomena are non-fungible, relational, context-dependent, constitutive, and partly destroyed by abstraction. Their value often lies in the particular relationship, meaning, manner and attention involved. They are not merely quantities of some common substrate to be maximised. Qualia is a fantastic example: literally, what it is like to be a living thing, to quote Nagel or, as a specific example, what it is like, from the inside, to hear Tchaikovsky. The best the ‘impact’ movements can do in response is say ‘Tchaikovsky is listened to by z amount of people which infers that there may be something good about listening to Tchaikovsky, so we might want to increase the amount of Tchaikovsky listening going on’. Priced Order grammar can measure proxies or consequences of priceless phenomena, but it cannot fully adopt ontologies like qualia which underpin the priceless. Thus, it cannot represent priceless phenomena without changing the fundamental nature of what those phenomena are.

Just because there is something grammatically different about priced and priceless phenomena, why should we seek a distinct institutional order? Shouldn’t we rather make priceless phenomena more legible within existing Priced Order systems, or fuse the two realms in some other way?

Translation between the orders can certainly help: demonstrating that relationships improves societal health, or that art supports societal wellbeing, can secure recognition and resources for important issues. But protection justified exclusively in these terms remains conditional on serving a separate purpose. The question is therefore not only whether priceless phenomena are recognised, but who determines the terms of their recognition. This is a question of institutional power.

While we can imagine situations where translation and even fusion may sometimes succeed, an unequal distribution of institutional power between the orders risks the assimilation of one by the other. In practice, this manifests as control of funding, professional incentives, and accountability and, ultimately, one order having the authority to decide what counts as success for the other. Priceless phenomena therefore need institutions capable of negotiating those terms, and sometimes refusing them. Their standing should not depend entirely on demonstrating benefits in another order’s language.

Priceless institutional design would involve some level of independence under systems of governance, or economic independence including protection from priced incentives, and the bestowing of countervailing power such that bona fide relationships of mutual recognition and co-operation between the orders could be established. It need not mean separate organisations in every domain. A school, care provider, or cultural institution might embody both, provided its priceless purposes have resources, recognition and authority that cannot routinely be overridden by its measurable objectives.

We need a counterbalance that can stand strong at the systemic level. This is the promise of an institution-based Priceless Order.

A Movement

What we already know and where there is already good work is compelling and broad. To name those people and efforts that are top of mind:

Iain McGilchrist’s ‘The Master and His Emissary’ gives us an account of two modes of attention and, ultimately, the impact on Western Civilisation and, by extension, global civilisation of the increasing dominance of the left hemisphere over the right hemisphere.
John Vervaeke’s ‘Awakening from the Meaning Crisis’ diagnoses modernity as destroying and undermining the ecologies of practices and wisdom institutions through which humans historically achieved meaning, transformation, transcendence and connection, without giving us adequate replacements.
Daniel Schmachtenberger defines the Metacrisis as many apparently separate civilisational problems arising from a common underlying incentive structure, coordination failure and technological dynamics and calls us to repair the Priced Order from inside its own bounds.
Hartmut Rosa argues that modernity damages certain kinds of relationships with the world and that overcoming alienation requires reconstructing those relationships.
The Harvard Human Flourishing Program and the Wellbeing Economy Alliance are developing empirical science and measures to capture a meaning-based philosophy.
And many others from Joseph Campbell’s writings on mythology and what religion gave us that we’ve lost, to Newfield, Alexandrova, and John’s ‘Limits of the Numerical: The Abuses and Uses of Quantification’, Polanyi on the ‘self-regulating market’, Bernard Williams on the ‘morality system’, Horkheimer on the ‘eclipse of reason’, and other works by Isaiah Berlin, Joseph Raz, Ruth Chang, Michael Sandel, Elizabeth Anderson etc.

These contributions are a hope-inducing mosaic but they are, ultimately, mostly independently conceived as theories and actions in the real world and, thereby, are disempowered. They lack the co-ordination and collective bargaining ability of more fully fledged, co-ordinated institutions. They therefore have little to no chance of stemming the tide of Priced Order overreach without proper synthesis, being developed upon, and being given life inside empowered institutions.

There is an entire missing category of civilisational work to be done. A mighty, powerful category, harnessing unity, polymathic approach, and multi-generational energy. To stand a chance, the whole needs to be bigger than the sum of its parts. This rests upon a strongly held assumption that with enough inspired, organised, and directed effort the emergence of better or new priceless institutions can be made more likely, rather than left to accretion and chance. This would amount to an engineering effort at the level of institutional infrastructure, while the intention would be as non-engineering as possible at the level of institutions undertaking their activities: institutions that make and protect space for people to discover, develop upon, adopt, and mutually guide their lives by priceless phenomena.

So, together, let’s build institutions and institutional networks which embody, inspire, and encapsulate the intellectual foundations, research questions, professions, and experiments necessary to raise up the Priceless Order.

As a first step, I’d want to bring together a set of deep thinkers and inspired doers to answer the following questions, and more:

In which domains do people deeply value priceless phenomena, but existing Priced Order institutions are systematically failing to cultivate or protect those phenomena or are actively harming them? We’d likely look for coordination failures (i.e. something is wanted, but nobody can conveniently organise it), incentive failures (i.e. institutions are rewarded for delivering measurable outputs while neglecting less measurable forms of value), and formation failures (i.e. where people have the resources and freedom to pursue worthwhile lives, but they still lack the habits, capabilities, traditions or other aspects to help them to do so)
What are the practical bottlenecks, domain-by-domain?
Can those bottlenecks be overcome without making the resulting activity itself an object of reductive measurement, instrumentalisation, or optimisation?
Of those domains left, which are the most promising?
How do we finance and sustain things whose value cannot adequately be expressed by measurement, instrumentalisation, or optimisation?
How do we give new or renewed priceless-oriented activities and organisations actual institutional form and power?

A slightly longer list of jobs of the Priceless Order likely look like building institutions, whether for profit (with a twist), not-for-profits, NGOs, charities, collectives, state-adjacent entities, or through other modern entity vessels, which establish, build, distribute, and nurture aspects including but not limited to:

A philosophy based on a pluralistic theory of value.
Federated sub-institutions infused with new philosophies, including schools, workplaces (e.g. from venture origination), neighbourhoods, cultural institutions. There is an inherent question around whether to build top down or bottom up institutions. My sense, in a world where AI concentrates wealth and power but where, in learning from the past, we may want to avoid creating overly powerful or socially coercive institutions, is that a hybrid approach of kindling bottom up sub-institutions while giving them the power broking and mouthpiece of overarching supra institutions may have promise. Independent authority must come with accountability. No institution has an uncontested mandate to speak for beauty, meaning, or the sacred. Institutions of the Priceless Order must therefore protect disagreement, participation, and the freedom to leave, while remaining answerable for expenditure, competence, exclusion, and abuse. Where there is resistance to reductive forms of measurement, for instance, it cannot become a blanket immunity from scrutiny.
Practices centred on shared experience, including contemplation, ritual, generalisable Sabbath, artistic creation, communion with nature, hospitality, celebration, deep conversation etc.
A relationship to measurement: an understanding of when it clarifies something and when it destroys the thing being measured.
Connections to existing policy and governance institutions, to help protect domains from inappropriate commodification or optimisation.
Technology creation and dispersion with a new philosophical directionality, for instance AI that enlarges rather than substitutes for human agency, relationship, wonder, and creation. Most importantly, perhaps, we could use novel and powerful technologies as a translation device for turning our most initial, instinctive reasonings on pluralities and indeterminate value into commonly understood, mutually actionable language.
A culture of restoring social status and prestige to lives devoted to teaching, parenting, art & craft, community & stewardship, and scholarship.

Some initially promising tracks and sub-domain areas might include:

Relational institutions track
1. Local community
2. Elderly caregiving and intergenerational relations
3. Family support and parenting
Human formation institutions track
1. Education for wisdom, attention, and contemplation
2. Rituals, rites of passage, unstructured play
3. Artistic practice and craftsmanship
Civilisational institutions track
1. Priceless capital allocation
2. New institutional governance mechanics
3. Nature and beautiful places
Technology track (supporting the above rather than fundamental, as the most promising institutional solutions may use AI and other technologies to remove practical bottlenecks while deliberately preserving the human activities that create value)
1. Human-centred technology
2. Human agency in the AI age
3. Technology and human flourishing

These experiments require the service of researchers, founders, capital allocators, designers, educators, carers, public administrators, and representatives of a litany of other disciplines.

The current blockers to progress are likely to vary between tracks and domain areas. Where people are not recognising the importance of a particular priceless phenomenon, the response may need to be the production of ideas, culture and public argument. Where people recognise a particular priceless phenomenon but are working separately from each other, the response may need to be field building and coordination. Where existing institutions want to act but do not know how, the response may need to be framework or model development and practitioner learning. Where existing institutions want to act and know how, but there are too few capable leaders, the response may need to be competency formation and training. Where rules or incentives are preventing good practice, the response may need to be institutional reform or policy. Where organisations are repeatedly struggling with the same practical burden, the response may need to be shared infrastructure. Where capable people and organisations have credible plans but insufficient resources, the response may need to be revised capital allocation.

I intend to define some of these approaches, track areas, and related concepts in greater detail, in follow-up papers. I also intend to write more on where existing institutions lack the power to sufficiently defend priceless phenomena, how the Priceless Order would secure that power, and why the modern adaptation of attempts to preserve the priceless has not been enough, and would likely continue not to be even in abundance rich futures. Having said this, I also intend to write on how a key failure mode of other world-changing theses, like that of the Transhumanists, is the instinct that all existing institutions are broken beyond repair and must therefore be worked around. I will argue that, even where existing institutions are not enough, we must make sure to be humble in the presence of key remnants of the totality of human knowledge and experience and factor them into our plans where possible.

The Priceless Order has made three propositions. First, the ontological: reality contains inherently plural, incommensurable forms of value that cannot be adequately reduced to a common unit of utility. Second, the civilisational: modern institutions systematically privilege what can be measured, instrumentalised and optimised, leaving other forms of value institutionally underrepresented and vulnerable. Third, the practical: we need a complementary institutional order, with its own philosophy, organisations, professions, resources and authority, capable of cultivating and defending these values.

There are people across the world who have spent years recognising different fragments of the same problem. Philosophers searching for a richer understanding of value. Scientists and technologists wondering what their expanding capabilities should ultimately serve. Entrepreneurs who want to devote their talents to something more consequential than increasing convenience. Teachers, artists, carers, and community-builders struggling to sustain approaches whose importance they understand intimately, but which the prevailing institutional order struggles to recognise and adopt.

What if these people were not working on separate problems? What if their efforts represented the beginnings of an entirely new field of civilisational work?

I believe that this might be the case.

The Priceless Order is an invitation to bring these efforts together and, united, to go further: to construct the philosophy, professions, networks, and resources necessary to give priceless phenomena a powerful and enduring place in human civilisation. In the human story that is yet to be written. In our contribution to what is already becoming the values of non-human minds, and what one day, perhaps relatively soon, may go beyond earthly values and become cosmic values.

We will need philosophers willing to deepen the intellectual foundations; researchers willing to challenge our assumptions; founders and entrepreneurs willing to build; artists, teachers, and community leaders willing to show us what a richer human life can look like; and capital allocators ready to support undertakings whose greatest value may resist conventional measurement, instrumentalisation, and optimisation.

I do not presume to know exactly what the fully realised Priceless Order will look like. Indeed, its commitment to pluralism demands that no single person should. But I believe we know enough to begin.

If these ideas resonate with you, I would like to hear from you. Tell me what is missing from this account. Tell me which neglected institution you think the world needs. Tell me what you would build, and what you could contribute. Let’s go forward together.

We have built extraordinary institutions for the means of human existence. It is time to build equally extraordinary institutions for its ends.

Join me.

Sam Lowenstein
October 2026