Abstract
Given the axiom that social reality consists of individuals and their
interactions, and the conjecture that the interesting way individuals
interact is through choice, this paper explicates three postulates in
four stages:
1) choices are made up of ‘entrained’ sub-choices: thoughts and acts
that must be made for the pursuit of another goal;
2) a sub-choice ‘entrained’ in all other choices is a choice for
‘predictability’: a quasi-Bayesian assessment whereby the greater an
option’s predictability, the more likely it is to be chosen;
3) it is axiomatic that decisions should always be informed by as many
truths and as few falsehoods as possible; true ‘is’ statements can only
result in more fulfilling ‘ought’ statements;
4) 1 and 2, and their implications, constitute ‘is’s of sociodynamics,
generating a moral and ethical ‘ought’ which I will call ‘Political
Existentialism’, a stance that should inform ways in which we organize
and run our societies to allow the pursuit of Eudaimonia.
Both concepts point to a sociological ‘constant’: if every choice
entrains predictability and predictability is a measurable variable,
then each choice can be related to every other choice in a measurable
way; because choice is the way in which individuals consciously interact
with their environments and one another, predictability can be used as a
‘common ground’ to measure and compare cases of choice-based
sociodynamics.