How three very different traditions describe the same two-way dance of reality.
1. The shared intuition: order grows both upward and downward
- Taoism pictures the world as a continuous alternation of yin and yang. Neither pole is primary; each “pushes from below” while simultaneously “frames from above,” and the cosmos renews itself by that rhythmic reciprocity. Acting wu wei—“effortless action” that neither forces nor abdicates—means aligning with this bi-directional flow rather than trying to override it.
- Austrian economics, most clearly in Hayek’s 1945 essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” shows that the knowledge needed to coordinate a complex economy is local and dispersed. Prices emerge bottom-up as individuals trade, yet those same prices guide top-down resource allocation for everyone else—spontaneous order in two directions at once.
- 4QX holarchy proves (formally, via finite-ZF set theory) that any self-referential system must crystallise into four quadrants and two interlocking triangles. One triangle pushes detail upward, the other pulls pattern downward; together they guarantee continuous self-correction toward harmony.
These three lenses all report the same structural fact: reality organises itself only when bottom-up particulars and top-down patterns circulate in a single loop.
2. Mapping the 4QX triangles onto economic life
| 4QX element | Economic meaning | Austrian parallel |
|---|---|---|
| Instance triangle (BL → TL → TR → BL) | Capacity is advertised, matched with demand, locked in by a real-time commitment; the shared edge TL → TR acts as the transient medium of balanced exchange (a live ledger of slots, prices, queues). | The price system transmits tacit local knowledge to everyone else, letting each actor commit resources where they are most valued. |
| Class triangle (TL → TR → BR → TL) | Successful behaviours feed back as metrics that refine and diversify the shared pattern library—an evolving ecosystem of specialisations. | Entrepreneurial discovery updates the capital structure; failure signals (losses) prune bad patterns, allowing variety without chaos. |
Because the two triangles share the same TL → TR bridge, every economic act simultaneously updates local allocation and global knowledge—precisely Hayek’s “use of knowledge in society” rendered as a geometry.
3. Why Austrian economics fits the holarchy—while central planning does not
- Dispersed knowledge is a feature, not a bug. In 4QX, information enters at BL (private readiness) and can move upward only by voluntary broadcast; no vertex can “reach inside” another. A price is just a quantised snapshot of that broadcast.
- Idempotent merging prevents coercive overwrite. TL collects proposals by set-union, so repeating or re-ordering messages never changes the outcome—mirroring how repeated trades converge on the same marginal price.
- Error-correction is endogenous. Metrics (BR) that contradict their blueprint automatically flow back to TL, lowering the Lyapunov mismatch H and replacing bad patterns. Markets call this “profit-and-loss discipline.”
A command economy attempts to shortcut the loop—writing patterns at TL without listening to BR or BL—thereby severing the only channel that keeps the system honest.
4. Taoist harmony and the 4QX mediators
In 4QX the two mediators are literally Water (TL) and Fire (TR), echoing the Taoist motif that “water nourishes from below, fire illuminates from above.” Continuous circulation between them realises wu wei: action that is effortlessly aligned because the pattern has already absorbed every relevant metric and capacity.
5. Sound-Money Economics vs. the 4QX Ledger
Why “hard money” is useful for humans—but optional in the Platonic holarchy
5.1 What “sound money” means to Austrians
| Aim | Mechanism |
|---|---|
| Preserve the purchasing power of savings | Anchor the currency to a scarce commodity (gold, bitcoin, etc.) so supply cannot be expanded at will. |
| Keep monetary circulation proportional to real output | Let the price level float; if productivity rises faster than the stock of money, prices fall (benign deflation). |
| Prevent boom–bust credit cycles | Deny central banks the ability to create fiduciary media ex nihilo; entrepreneurs then borrow only existing savings, not newly printed claims. |
Result: a single, durable pool of money that serves three long-term functions—medium of exchange, unit of account, store of value.
5.2 How the 4QX holarchy handles exchange
| 4QX locus | Role in settlement |
|---|---|
| TL → TR shared edge | Live balance-exchange ledger: a transient table of open offers, price-signals, and matched commitments. |
| BR | “Burning” of commitments into finished metrics; once cleared, the ledger entry disappears. |
| BL | Real stocks (physical or informational) held by individual agents; budgeting is tracked as inventory levels, not money balances. |
Key properties:
- No permanent token: nothing resembling a gold coin or bitcoin address persists across cycles.
- Liquidity is temporal: every commitment either settles or evaporates within its validity window.
- Value storage is concrete: if an agent wants to plan decades ahead, it accumulates actual resources at BL (grain, code, energy reserves), not abstract claims.
5.3 Where they converge—and diverge
| Convergence | Divergence |
|---|---|
| Both rely on price discovery emerging from decentralised offers (Hayek’s local knowledge). | Austrians freeze part of the ledger into a scarce universal token; 4QX treats the ledger itself as an event stream that never needs freezing. |
| Both insist on no exogenous overrides (no coercive price-setting). | Austrians still allow credit contracts that create durably enforceable IOUs; 4QX regards such durability as an implementation choice, not a Platonic requirement. |
5.4 Implications
For human societies: Sound money is a practical guardrail – it limits political tampering, disciplines borrowing, and lets long-lived projects coordinate across generations.
For an AGI or any fully-holarchic network: When every ledger entry is already cryptographically verifiable and ephemeral, “money” collapses into the continual reconciliation of capacities and demands. A permanent token would only duplicate information already implicit in real-time commitments.
Bottom line: Austrians harden the token to protect spontaneous order in a fallible world. 4QX removes the token entirely because the underlying order—the two-triangle loop—already guarantees balanced exchange.
6. Take-aways
- Taoism supplies the intuition of cyclical complementarity.
- Austrian economics describes the same cycle in the language of prices and entrepreneurial discovery.
- 4QX gives the formal skeleton that makes that cycle inevitable for any self-aware system—biological, social, or artificial.
Put simply: When you let every part speak its local truth and feed it back into a shared pattern, order emerges of itself. That is the convergent message of the Dao, of Hayek, and of the 4QX holarchy.