Participation and Conformity

Participation and conformity are two ways a universal good can relate to particular cases: under conformity a case is judged by how closely it matches an abstract standard, and under participation it is judged by how fully it takes part in, and makes visible, a good that no single case exhausts.

Overview

The distinction comes from two essays Jordan Hall published on his Deepcode newsletter on 21 October 2026. “The Primacy of the Miraculous” argues that every regularity we know is produced by selecting some aspects of an event for a purpose and disregarding the rest, and that modern thought makes an error when it treats the selection as the whole of reality. “Participatory Universalism” contrasts formal universalism, which abstracts a form from many cases and governs them by conformity to it, with participatory universalism, which treats the universal as a real source that each particular manifests in its own way.

Read together, the essays give the BioConomy a philosophical account of two things the wiki argues elsewhere on structural and empirical grounds. The first essay explains why the Economy’s gauges misread the places they measure, the case documented in What GDP Leaves Out. The second describes the institutions a BioConomy builds: commitments between parties, vocations stated by places, and a standard that many BioRegions can share while no two of them look alike.

Hall writes as a theologian, and his universal is grounded in Christian theology. This page uses the structure of his argument with a living-systems universal: the capacity of the biosphere to keep generating life, as Elisabet Sahtouris described it. Sections headed as Hall’s account report his argument. The application to money, measurement and BioHub design is the wiki’s reading; Hall’s essays do not discuss bioregions.

Selection comes before regularity

Hall’s account

Hall begins from the claim that no actual event repeats. Two drops of the same ball occur in two different total states of the world. Repetition appears only after part of what happened is disregarded, and the choice of what to disregard follows a purpose, such as predicting where the ball lands or building a bridge. His sequence runs from actuality through selection, determination and comparison to regularity, and from regularity to prediction and control. A parallel ordering sets quality before quantity: things must first be distinguished by quality before they can be counted.

Scientific knowledge, on this account, is genuine and conditional. It is reliable inside the selections it rests on, and good enough for its purpose, in the way an aircraft needs only a good-enough understanding of flight to fly. The error Hall names is an inversion. Regularity enables prediction, and prediction enables control, so its practical priority comes to be mistaken for priority in reality. Whatever the model cannot hold is then filed as an anomaly.

Price as a selection

A price is the most widely used selection device in human coordination. It makes two singular things equivalent under one description and sets aside everything else about them. A tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent sequestered in restored shrubland and a tonne avoided in a tropical peat swamp become interchangeable units once the soil, species, hydrology and people of each place are left out of view. In Hall’s terms, fungibility is repetition produced by disregard. Karl Polanyi’s fictitious commodities name the cases where this selection is applied to land, labor and money, none of which was produced for sale.

The principle of protective illiquidity reads clearly in this light. Non-fungibility with the external unit of account keeps a bioregional asset’s particularity in view. The asset resists being made equivalent to everything else, so its value stays tied to the place and the relationships that produce it.

The gauge as a selection with a purpose

National accounts are a selection made for a purpose. Simon Kuznets, who prepared the first official estimates of US national income, cautioned in 1934 that national income could not measure the welfare of a nation [IC]. Within its purpose the gauge is good-enough knowledge. The inversion occurs when governance reads it as the condition of the society.

The same structure holds for every legibility signal, including the BioConomy’s own BioScore. A compressed indicator is legitimate as a selection made for a purpose. It misleads once it is treated as the definition of the thing it compresses. A performance-based bond that pays on catchment yield selects yield because investors need a measurable trigger, and the selection serves that purpose well. A catchment managed only for that number would lose whatever in it does not move the number.

Externalities as the economic exception

Hall observes that naturalism and supernaturalism share one architecture: a regular world plus a troublesome category of exceptions. Conventional economics has the same architecture. Markets clear inside the model, and the costs and benefits the model omits are classed as externalities, handled one at a time through taxes and offsets. The BioConomy reverses the order of priority. The living place is primary. A market is one selective determination made within it for particular purposes, and its scope can be stated.

Quality before quantity

Hall’s ordering of quality before quantity matches the sequence of the founding suite. The Place Mandate Template asks a BioHub to describe what its place knows needs doing before any value ledger is built, and the Direction of Fit check keeps outside money fitting to that description. On Hall’s argument, this sequence is correct in principle. A template that began with metrics would build the place’s description on a selection made before the place had been described.

Conformity and participation

Formal universalism in Hall’s account

Formal universalism compares many cases, removes their differences and keeps what remains as the universal form. The form then returns as a criterion, and particulars are judged by their conformity to it. Hall’s example is equality before the law, which is universal to the degree that it disregards differences among the persons it governs. Institutions built this way run on rules, rights, procedures and specifications. Their question is whether a particular case satisfies the form.

Hall credits this architecture with a real achievement. A formal rule protects against arbitrary power, because any restriction must be stated in a form that applies beyond the case at hand. Its weakness comes from the same abstraction. A market can be formally free while its communities are hollowed out and the consent of its weaker parties becomes nominal. Formal universalism detects unequal treatment well. It is less able to judge whether the formally equal activity serves a good form of life.

The Economy as formal universalism

The Economy is formal universalism built in money. A national currency holds the same value whatever it is attached to, and contract gives every party equal standing. Sustainability standards, carbon methodologies and nature-related disclosure frameworks ask the formal question of an asset: does it meet the specification? These instruments do what formal universalism does well. They also carry its blind spot, because a compliant asset can sit in a place whose living systems are declining.

Participatory universalism in Hall’s account

Participatory universalism treats the universal as a real and inexhaustible source in which particulars take part. Participation does not require replication. A universal good can take different concrete forms according to the nature and vocation of what receives it. Institutions built this way run on covenants, practices, vocations and discernment. Their question is whether a particular reality faithfully takes part in and makes visible the universal good.

Hall’s tests for a legitimate market under this frame read as a charter for bioregional economics:

• whether property relations preserve stewardship
• whether bargaining is reciprocal
• whether communities can reproduce themselves
• whether producers carry the costs they impose
• whether the activity serves the goods it depends on

Vocation and the needed place

Applied to a BioRegion, participation is a matter of vocation. The shift described in needed versus needy is a vocational claim. A needy place applies for funding by meeting a funder’s criteria, which is conformity. A needed place states the work it knows needs doing and the terms on which others may engage, which is participation. The Place Mandate is the document in which a BioHub states that vocation.

Hall’s image for this structure is the Theotokos. Mary’s significance is inseparable from the extremity of her particularity, and through it something universal becomes present. A BioHub gains significance in the same direction. Its value to the network lies in the particular place it serves. Treated as one more instance of a general class, such as a regional development agency, it loses what makes it worth funding.

Responsibilities as the participatory grammar

Hall notes that participatory universalism often produces responsibilities where formal universalism produces rights. The formal question asks what no one may do to me. The participatory question asks what forms of freedom we need in order to take part rightly in what is good.

The BioConomy already works in the second grammar. A commitment pool is built from binding forward promises, and promise theory holds that an agent can promise only what it controls. A commitment is a responsibility that a particular party takes on in a particular place. Money can carry either grammar. A commitment voucher records who promised what to whom. A national currency removes that record so the unit can circulate anywhere. A bioregional currency designed around commitments keeps particularity inside the unit itself.

A shared standard without sameness

A movement that holds every bioregion to be different risks relativism: no way to tell faithful practice from distorted practice, and nothing outside capital can compare. Hall’s account answers that risk. Participation can be fuller or poorer, and the universal stays above every manifestation of it and can judge each one. A network of BioHubs can hold one criterion, how fully each place takes part in the regeneration of the living systems it belongs to, while the practices that meet it differ from one watershed to the next. Measures then serve as evidence of participation, read with the conditionality the first essay requires.

How the two layers meet

The essay Two Systems, One Society describes the Economy and the BioConomy as parallel systems in one society. This concept gives a philosophical description of each system’s layer. The Economy holds the formal layer, with contract law and priced instruments. The BioConomy holds the participatory layer, with commitments and place mandates. Neither replaces the other.

Transvestment is the crossing between them. A particular participation, such as stewardship of a catchment, is rendered as a selection the formal layer can price, such as a yield figure that triggers a bond payment. The Bankable Service Alignment Template is where a BioHub makes that selection deliberately and records it as a selection, together with what it leaves out.

The wiki offers a reading in TIME terms for testing. Formal universalism describes the logic of the Institutional and Market forms. Participatory universalism resembles the covenant logic of the Tribal form, which historically did not scale beyond kinship. Cosmo-local production shows participatory universalism with a scaling mechanism: knowledge is shared everywhere, and production always happens somewhere particular. That pattern may describe part of what the Emergent form adds. The mapping is a construct of this wiki. It belongs to neither Hall nor Ronfeldt.

Design rules that follow

1. Every gauge states its purpose and names what it disregards. The wiki’s claim tags and page statuses already apply this discipline to claims, and the same discipline applies to instruments, indicators and the BioScore.
2. A place is described by quality before anything in it is counted. The founding suite’s sequence holds this order.
3. A BioHub is judged by the degree of its participation, with metrics used as evidence of participation. Conformity to a specification answers a different question and belongs to the formal layer.
4. The formal floor stays. Rights, transparent rules and enforceable contracts remain beneath every participatory institution, because they protect against arbitrary power.

Limits and open questions

Participatory judgment needs people to do the discerning, and Hall’s essays do not say who discerns or how. A forum asked whether a proposal faithfully serves a place’s good can be captured by whoever claims to speak for that good. Rule 4 answers part of this risk. The governance design for discernment inside a BioHub is open work.

Hall’s universal is theological. The structure of the argument carries over to a living-systems universal, and the wiki uses it that way. Readers who share Hall’s theology can read the universal in his terms, and the design rules above hold under either reading.

The essays are short philosophical arguments. This page reports them as a framework and applies them by structural inference. None of the applications has yet been tested in a working BioHub.

Related

• What GDP Leaves Out. The empirical case for the gauge misreading the places it measures.
• Economy versus BioConomy. The structural differences, including the measurement instrument.
• Two Systems, One Society. The parallel-systems frame this page describes philosophically.
• Direction of Fit. Place-first grounding before any funding relationship.
• Commitment Pooling. The participatory grammar in operation.
• Obligation and Invitation. Two demand mechanisms that map onto the formal and participatory layers.
• Transvestment. The crossing between the two layers.
• Cosmo-Local Production. Participation with a scaling mechanism.
• The TIME Framework. The coordination forms referred to above.
• Jordan Hall. The author of the two essays.

Sources

• Hall, J. (2026). Participatory Universalism. Deepcode
• Hall, J. (2026). The Primacy of the Miraculous. Deepcode
• Kuznets, S. (1934). National Income, 1929–1932
• Polanyi, K. (1944). The Great Transformation
• Ruddick, W. O. (2023). Commitment Pooling: An Economic Protocol Inspired by Ancestral Wisdom
• Sahtouris, E. (2000). EarthDance

Provenance

Written 22 October 2026 in the BioConomy project from two essays by Jordan Hall, “Participatory Universalism” and “The Primacy of the Miraculous” (Deepcode, 21 October 2026), which Michael Haupt supplied as PDFs. The sections headed as Hall’s account report his argument. The applications (price as selection, externalities as the exception category, vocation and the needed place, the reading of protective illiquidity, the two layers, the design rules) are the wiki’s. The TIME mapping is the wiki’s construct and is marked as such. Hall’s theological ground is set aside in favor of a living-systems universal, with a note saying so. Worked examples are kept general; no place-specific material is included. The page is structural-inference because its applications go beyond what Hall states and have not been tested.