Serve Self-interest: G1

Means & Ends

The ends are to maintain and, if possible, increase your wealth and social standing. The means depend on benefiting yourself, which leads directly to the 7 types of interacting for benefit.

The requirement here is to select a key aspect of the approach to characterize the monads, one that provides the foundation for their combination.

G11: Secure Your Finances

Money serves your self-interest and the market-centrednessis the only approach that provides this focus. There is no doubt that having enough money is essential for looking after yourself, and that people compete whenever money is made available: be it a job, a prize, or a handout.

The phrase secure finances leaves open how the money is obtained, and what to do when you have obtained it.

G12: Use Your Strengths

Many of the power-centred principles seem ethically problematic. Competition is intrinsic to this approach in which people jockey for a place in the pecking order. There is always a power system and you always have to handle it one way or another.

In order to survive and limit your suffering at the hands of others, you must use your strengths knowing full well that others are likely to be using theirs.

G13: Apply Your Expertise

Focused cause-centred energy and passion can be harnessed to specialist work in which you have become expert. To get the maximum benefit, you need to look for opportunities to apply your expertise.

There will always be others operating in your field with whom you will be in competition, which means the high standards and passion for excellence characteristic of this approach become particularly important.

G14: Harness your Groups

Joining groups is essential given that sole individuals are vulnerable and, from a political perspective, barely exist in society. Entry to groups that provide status or business advantages will be competitive. But other important groups, like interest-based associations, welcome all comers. Because all groups expect and require a degree of attention, time and energy, they must be viewed as a potential resource.

Any group has its own logic of action that and its priorities generate factions that compete. You can harness your group by joining a faction that aligns with your personal ends, but it will be in competition with other factions seeking different priorities.

G15: Develop Relationships

Kinship-centredness engenders the value of relationships on which you can depend and which will treat you like the person you are. Bonding requires emotional work and you will find yourself in competition with others for close relationships.

Relationships are also in competition with time on other activities.

G16: Perform Analyses

Perspective-centredness promotes dispassionate analyses from multiple perspectives. In looking after yourself, you have to know what is going on and that means you will benefit from performing analyses from your own perspective. Your analysis will inevitably be in competition with analyses by others who apply different emphases or even have a completely different perspective. Diverse analyses generate diverse and often conflicting conclusions and recommendations.

G17: Be Realistic

While identifying with reality-centredness is unnatural and undesirable for most, the intrinsic value of being realistic in looking out for yourself is easily accepted. The issue here is that people differ as to what the reality is and press intensely and urgently for their perception to count. That means being realistic is a competitive process in many social situations.

Transition

If you use the G1-means of benefitingyou will serve your self-interest, but these means do not in themselves .......

It is therefore necessary that take risks. Taking risks seems and is dangerous, so mostly we seek to avoid an minimize risk. However, life without risk is not possible and risk-taking must be accepted.

This is made possible by adding one adjacent level to form dyads.

Originally posted: 30-Jun-2025.