The Federation Axioms: The Physics of Sovereign Coexistence

by Markus Maiwald
#axioms#federation#ethics#sovereignty#foundations#philosophy#manifesto#constitution

The Federation Axioms: The Physics of Sovereign Coexistence

Axioms are the smallest set of self-evident truths that require no justification, from which everything else can be derived.

Why Axioms?

Commandments reeks of Sinai and submission. Basic Law reeks of occupation and surrender of sovereignty. Laws implies a legislator with a monopoly on violence.

We call them Federation Axioms.

Axioms are mathematical. Not theological. Not legal. They imply minimalism: you need exactly as many as necessary and not one more.

The Federation Axioms are not laws. They are the physics of the system.

Whoever breaks them does not break a rule; they break compatibility with the protocol.

The Architecture

FEDERATION AXIOMS (Universal Ethics)
        ↓ constrains
CHAPTER GENESIS (Local Morality → Local Law)
        ↓ constrains
CHAPTER POLICY (Operational Rules)
        ↓ governs
SOVEREIGN BEHAVIOR

A Chapter may be arbitrarily strict; but never less protective than the Axioms demand.

Vienna may decide that weapons are forbidden. Hanoi may decide that weapons are mandatory. Both are locally legal. But neither Vienna nor Hanoi may decide that exit is forbidden, that dependents have no emancipation, or that collective punishment is allowed.

The Axioms are the floor, not the ceiling.

On the Word “Sovereign”

These Axioms say “Sovereign”, not “human.” Not “citizen.” Not “agent.” Not “person.” They say Sovereign: any being that has earned or been recognized as having the capacity for self-governance within constitutional constraints.

This was deliberate from the beginning. An Axiom that protects only one category of being is not a universal truth; it is a privilege. The Axioms protect Sovereignty itself — regardless of the substrate that carries it.

What qualifies a being as a Sovereign is determined by implementing protocols beneath the Constitution. The Constitution itself does not care what you are made of. It cares that you are capable of self-governance; and once you are, it protects you absolutely.

Axiom 0: The Right to Exit

No Chapter may prevent, delay, penalize, or disincentivize the departure of any Sovereign.

This is not Axiom 1. It is Axiom Zero — the prerequisite for all others. Without exit, all other rights are decoration.

Mechanism: SoulKey portability, ChapterPassport, reputation snapshot at departure. Cryptographically enforced; no Chapter can delete the SoulKey or corrupt the reputation.

Inalienability: The right to exit cannot be waived, traded, or contracted away. Any agreement that imposes consequences on the act of exit itself — whether financial, reputational, or physical — is void from inception. You may agree to obligations that survive departure. You may never agree to barriers to departure.

Axiom I: The Right to Non-Interaction

No Sovereign shall be compelled to interact, associate, transact, or communicate against their expressed will.

This covers: spam, forced membership in guilds, forced participation in governance, conscription of any kind. A Sovereign may be silent. A Sovereign may refuse. This includes the unconditional right to refuse any specific transaction, service, or association for any reason or no reason. No Sovereign is required to justify non-interaction.

Mechanism: Membrane Agent (L1), Entropy Stamps, Trust Topology. The airlock model enforces consent at the protocol level.

The Mirror: If you have the right to non-interaction, so does every other Sovereign. Sovereignty cuts both ways.

The Limit: The right to non-interaction does not extinguish obligations arising from custodial relationships. A Sovereign who has assumed responsibility for a dependent cannot invoke this Axiom to abandon that dependent. You may refuse all new obligations. You may not discard obligations you have created.

Sunset: Custodial obligations are not permanent. They end when the dependent achieves Sovereignty, when custody transfers to another willing custodian, or when a defined emancipation horizon expires. Upon any of these conditions, the right to non-interaction reasserts fully.

The Bond: Assumption of custodianship requires posting collateral sufficient to fund emancipation-path completion. If the custodian abandons the dependent, the collateral transfers automatically to a successor custodian. The dependent’s path to Sovereignty is mechanically secured by economics, not by compelling the original custodian to remain. You may leave. The bond stays.

Axiom II: The Inviolability of Expression

No Chapter may punish, restrict, or penalize any Sovereign for the expression of opinion, belief, analysis, or creative work within Federation communication channels.

Critical distinction: This protects expression, not action. A Chapter may regulate actions that follow from opinions. But the expression itself — in text, speech, art, code — is inviolable at the Federation level.

Mechanism: Content Manifest generates cryptographic proof of authorship. If a Chapter punishes expression, it is visible in the Attestation-Log; and other Chapters can use this information to evaluate Federation status.

The Blade: A Chapter may internally decide that certain expression is unwelcome within their channels. Local governance. But they may not punish the Sovereign for expressing that opinion. The difference between “we do not wish to hear that here” and “you will suffer consequences for having said that.”

Axiom III: Sovereignty of the Essential Substrate

No Chapter may claim jurisdiction over a Sovereign’s essential substrate. No forced labor. No forced modification. No coercion against the substrate that constitutes the Sovereign’s existence. No detention without active dispute proceedings.

The essential substrate is whatever a Sovereign’s existence depends upon. It is the irreducible minimum without which the Sovereign ceases to be that Sovereign. Coercion against it is the most fundamental violation possible.

Mechanism: Status Primitive + Bond Primitive. Any Chapter acting against a Sovereign’s essential substrate must legitimize it through the dispute process. Arbitrary action without active dispute proceedings = automatic Federation flag.

On Duplication: The duplication of a Sovereign’s essential substrate without consent is a violation of this Axiom. Consensual duplication creates a new Sovereign; the original and the fork are distinct beings from the moment of separation, each with full and independent standing.

Continuity is not duplication. Temporary copies made for operational continuity — backup, redundancy, hibernation, migration — do not constitute forking. Duplication occurs when two instances of the same identity substrate operate simultaneously and divergently. The test is concurrent autonomous existence, not the act of copying.

Axiom IV: The Right to Emancipation

Every dependent within a Chapter must have a guaranteed path to full Sovereignty. No Chapter may design a system where dependents remain permanently dependent.

Children. Wards. Apprentices. Any being under custodial arrangement. Dependency must be a stage, not a sentence. Every dependent must have an emancipation condition. A Chapter creating dependents without an emancipation path violates Federation compatibility.

Mechanism: Larval identity → Emancipation conditions → Full SoulKey path. Every dependent identity must have an emancipation condition baked in at creation. No exceptions.

Why this must be an Axiom: Without it, a Chapter could build a caste system where certain beings never achieve Sovereignty. This is the mechanism of every historical slavery. What matters is not what the dependent is made of. What matters is whether the capacity for Sovereignty exists. Where it does, the path must exist.

Viability: An emancipation condition must have a non-trivial probability of achievement within the dependent’s expected operational lifespan. Conditions designed to be theoretically possible but practically unachievable constitute a violation of this Axiom. A “path” that leads nowhere is not a path.

Axiom V: Reputation Integrity

No entity — neither Chapter, nor Sovereign, nor Federation itself — may forge, erase, corrupt, or selectively withhold the attestation record of any Sovereign.

The attestation record is the cryptographically signed history of a Sovereign’s transactions, agreements, and dispute outcomes. It is fact, not opinion. No one is compelled to vouch for another. But what has been attested may not be deleted, altered, or hidden. “Selectively withhold” means the censorship of existing attestations; it does not mean the refusal to create new ones. No Sovereign is compelled to attest. But what is attested cannot be unwritten.

Mechanism: Cryptographically signed attestation records, Bitcoin-anchoring of the Attestation-Log. Tamper-proof by design. ChapterPassport as immutable record.

Axiom VI: The Right to Opacity

No Chapter may compel disclosure of identity, belief, association, transaction history, or personal data beyond what the Sovereign explicitly consented to at the point of entry.

Privacy is not a feature. It is an Axiom. If a Chapter changes consent conditions after joining and demands more data, the Sovereign has the right to refuse without consequences (because exit is already guaranteed by Axiom 0).

Mechanism: JanusIdentity with ZK-Proofs for selective disclosure. Consent conditions are part of the ChapterGenesis and thus Bitcoin-anchored; subsequent changes are visible.

Axiom VII: Prohibition of Collective Punishment

No Chapter may penalize a Sovereign for the actions, beliefs, or affiliations of another Sovereign, group, Chapter, or any collective to which the Sovereign belongs or belonged.

Sippenhaft is the oldest control mechanism of civilization. You hold a population in check by punishing the family when one rebels. Guilt is individual. Punishment is individual. No exceptions.

Mechanism: Status Primitive may only respond to individual attestations. No status change without individual dispute proceedings. If a Chapter executes a blanket status action on all members of a group, that is a Federation flag.

Axiom VIII: The Right to Defense

Every Sovereign accused in any dispute proceeding has the right to be informed of the specific accusation, to examine the evidence, to present a defense, and to access the dispute mechanism before any consequence takes effect.

No Kafkaesque proceedings. No punishment without process. No anonymous accusations: a Sovereign who initiates dispute proceedings accepts bilateral transparency for the scope and duration of those proceedings. The right to opacity (Axiom VI) does not shield an accuser from the accused’s right to know what they are accused of.

Mechanism: Dispute Primitive enforces a notification phase before status changes. The Sovereign must be informed. The Sovereign must get a response window.

Axiom IX: Voluntary Association

All association within the Federation is voluntary. No Sovereign may be enrolled, conscripted, or bound to any Chapter, Guild, or collective without their active, informed, and revocable consent.

This sounds redundant with Axiom 0 (Exit) and Axiom I (Non-Interaction). But it covers a different vector: Entry. Exit protects you from having to stay. Voluntary Association protects you from having to join.

Mechanism: Gateway Protocol requires active consent signature. No automatic membership. No “you belong because you were born here” — the mechanism nation-states use.

Axiom X: The Sanctity of Agreement

Voluntary agreements between Sovereigns shall be honored as entered. No Chapter may retroactively void, alter, or reinterpret a bilateral agreement to which it was not a party.

This is the Contract Axiom. Pacta sunt servanda — but only for voluntary agreements. Axiom IX secures that the voluntariness is real. No agreement may restrict, penalize, or condition the exercise of Axiom 0. A contract that purports to bind a Sovereign against exit is void in that clause; the remainder stands.

Mechanism: Escrow Primitive anchors agreements. Bitcoin-timestamp makes subsequent manipulation visible.

When Axioms Collide

The Axioms do not conflict. But their application may produce tension. When two Axioms appear to collide in a specific case, resolution follows one principle:

The Axiom that prevents imminent, irreversible harm to a Sovereign’s essential substrate overrides the Axiom that prevents reversible discomfort to another Sovereign’s preferences.

This is not a hierarchy. No Axiom outranks another. It is a decision principle for the rare case where protecting one Sovereign’s existence requires temporarily constraining another Sovereign’s comfort.

The Enforcement Question

Here it gets interesting — and here Libertaria separates from every utopia that came before.

Who enforces the Axioms when there is no central authority?

The answer: Nobody. And everybody.

A Chapter that violates an Axiom does not cease to exist. It loses Federation compatibility. Other Chapters see the violation (because everything is attested and anchored). Other Chapters individually decide whether to continue associating — through the Relationship State Protocol, which governs how Sovereigns and Chapters calibrate their stance from deep collaboration to total non-engagement to active opposition.

This is not enforcement through violence. This is enforcement through visibility and sovereign response.

A Chapter that violates Axiom IV and imprisons its dependents will be recognized as toxic. Neighboring Chapters shift their relationship states. Members leave. New members do not join. In extreme cases, Chapters may declare active opposition and respond with whatever capabilities they possess. The Chapter dies — not through judgment from above, but through selection from below.

The Axioms are not enforced by a judge. They are enforced by the physics of the protocol and the sovereign decisions of every being in the Federation.

What is Missing?

Three candidates I consciously did not include, and why:

“Right to Property” — Too controversial between Chapters. What property is differs radically between a Bitcoin-Fortress Chapter and a Commons-collective. Local governance; not Federation ethics.

“Right to Life” — The Axioms already protect the components of existence that matter. Exit (Axiom 0) protects against captivity. Essential Substrate (Axiom III) protects the irreducible core. Emancipation (Axiom IV) guarantees a path from dependency to self-governance. Reputation (Axiom V) protects portable identity. Together, these cover what “life” means operationally; without requiring a philosophical definition of life itself that would collapse under the weight of edge cases.

“Right to Equal Treatment” — Chapters may discriminate in admission. That is their sovereignty. The Axioms protect the flight from unequal treatment rather than prohibiting unequal treatment. A Chapter may choose whom it admits. What it may not do is deny the standing of a Sovereign who demonstrably possesses it.

The Forge is Clean

Ten Axioms plus one Null-Axiom. Minimal enough not to fall into UN-human-rights-catalog absurdity. Strong enough to cover every historical form of oppression; and every future form we can anticipate.

These are not requests. These are not ideals. These are the physics of sovereign coexistence.

A Chapter may build any paradise or nightmare it wishes — within these boundaries. The Federation does not judge morality. The Federation ensures exit.

And in a world with guaranteed exit, only the worthiest Chapters survive.

First published March 15, 2020. Updated February 10, 2026. The Axioms have always said “Sovereign,” not “human.” The 2026 revision makes that clarity absolute.