Provisional commitments of the Church of the Finite Circle
A dogma is a belief imposed by authority. You accept it or you're out. A catma is a belief held provisionally — firmly enough to act on, loosely enough to revise. The term comes from the Discordian tradition, which understood that the most dangerous thing about a belief system is not its content but its rigidity.
These catmas are not commandments. Nobody is commanding you. They're our best current understanding of how to live without destroying each other or the planet. If you can show us a better understanding, we will revise them. That's not a weakness. That's the whole point.
The numbering is for reference, not ranking. Catma I is not more important than Catma IX. If forced to pick the most important one, we'd probably pick VIII — the one that says the others can be overridden.
No person is above any other person. No species is above any other species. No idea is above question.
The Earth is a finite, living system. We are members of it, not managers of it. What we take, we must return.
Aldo Leopold wrote that the land ethic "simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land." We are not landlords. We are not stewards. We are plain members and citizens of the biotic community, and we have been very bad neighbors.
"What we take, we must return" is adapted from Robin Wall Kimmerer's concept of the honorable harvest: take only what is given, take only what you need, use everything you take, give thanks, and reciprocate. This is not mysticism. This is the operating manual for a species that wants to keep existing.
The word "finite" matters. James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis — that living organisms and inorganic elements form a self-regulating system — has been validated as earth system science. The Earth is not a warehouse of resources. It is a living system with limits, and we are inside it, not above it.
Growth without limit is not progress. Enough is not failure. The economy is a subset of the ecology, not the other way around.
Herman Daly, the father of ecological economics, distinguished growth (getting bigger) from development (getting better). A steady-state economy "develops qualitatively without growing quantitatively in physical dimensions." This is not stagnation. It's maturity. A person who stops growing taller at 18 does not stop developing.
The 1972 Limits to Growth report modeled what happens when you pursue exponential growth on a finite planet. In 2020, a KPMG researcher found that 50 years of real-world data tracked the "business as usual" collapse scenario disturbingly well. We did not change course.
E.F. Schumacher said it plainly: "An attitude to life which seeks fulfilment in the single-minded pursuit of wealth — in short, materialism — does not fit into this world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the environment in which it is placed is strictly limited."
Kate Raworth's doughnut economics gives us the image: a safe space between a social foundation (everyone has enough) and an ecological ceiling (the planet can sustain it). No country on Earth currently fits inside the doughnut. That's the project.
Power concentrates unless actively distributed. Any system — including this one — must be designed to disperse authority, not accumulate it.
Jo Freeman's 1970 essay "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" identified the core problem: "There is no such thing as a structureless group." When a group claims to have no leaders, what it actually has is informal leaders who are unaccountable. The solution is not to pretend hierarchy doesn't exist but to design structures that actively prevent its accumulation: rotation of roles, delegation with accountability, transparent decision-making, and the distribution of information.
The Zapatistas practice "mandar obedeciendo" — lead by obeying. Leaders are delegates, not authorities. They are recallable. They serve the assembly, not the other way around. This has functioned across roughly 300,000 people for more than 30 years.
Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for demonstrating that communities can govern shared resources without either privatization or top-down control — but only with clear rules, participatory decision-making, and accountability mechanisms.
"Including this one" is the important clause. This church has no exemption from its own principles. If it ever develops a leadership class, it has failed on its own terms.
Every person deserves dignity, sustenance, shelter, care, and the freedom to participate in the decisions that shape their life. These are not rewards to be earned.
This is not complicated. Food, water, shelter, healthcare, and political participation are not privileges to be distributed based on productivity, compliance, or birth. They are baseline conditions for a species that claims to be civilized.
"The freedom to participate in the decisions that shape their life" is the political core. A person who has food and shelter but no voice in how their community operates is not free. A person who can vote but cannot afford to eat is not free. Dignity requires both material security and political agency.
We note that this catma does not say "every citizen" or "every member." It says every person. Dignity does not require documentation.
Cooperation is more fundamental than competition. Mutual aid is not charity — it is the recognition that your wellbeing and mine are not separable.
Peter Kropotkin observed in 1902 what modern evolutionary biology has confirmed: cooperation is at least as fundamental as competition in the survival of species. Social Darwinism — the idea that nature is a war of all against all and the strong deserve to win — was never good science. It was ideology dressed in a lab coat.
Mutual aid is not charity. Charity flows downhill — from those who have to those who don't, reinforcing the hierarchy between them. Mutual aid flows sideways — between equals who recognize their interdependence. During the COVID-19 pandemic, mutual aid networks in the U.S. grew from roughly 50 to 800, demonstrating that when systems fail, people help each other. Not because they're told to. Because that's what people do when the structures designed to prevent it are temporarily disrupted.
The Mondragon cooperative in Spain's Basque Country demonstrates this at economic scale: 80,000 workers, democratic governance, pay ratios capped at roughly 1:6. It's not perfect. But it exists, and it works, and it has for decades.
We make no claims we cannot test, verify, or revise. We do not ask anyone to take anything on faith, including this.
This is what separates a catma from a dogma. A dogma says "believe this." A catma says "here's what we think, here's why we think it, and here's how you could show us we're wrong."
Charles Sanders Peirce's first rule of logic: "Do not block the way of inquiry." The moment you declare something beyond question, you have left the territory of honest thinking and entered the territory of power.
Note the careful language: "test, verify, or revise." Some claims are empirically testable (the planet is warming). Some are verifiable through logic and evidence (hierarchy concentrates power). Some are ethical commitments that can be revised through experience and argument (every person deserves dignity). None are articles of faith.
"Including this" — yes, even the commitment to verifiability is itself open to revision. We think it's a good commitment. We could be wrong. We're not going to pretend otherwise.
The spirit of these commitments overrides their literal expression. If a catma is ever used to justify harm, the catma is wrong, not the person being harmed.
This is the most important catma. It is the self-destruct mechanism built into the whole system.
Every set of principles in history has been weaponized. "Liberty" has been used to justify exploitation. "Equality" has been used to silence marginalized voices. "Freedom of speech" has been used to defend harassment. The problem is not the principles — it's the human tendency to follow the letter of the law while violating its spirit.
Catma VIII is directly inspired by The Satanic Temple's Tenet VII: "The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word." It is the catma that eats the other catmas if they go wrong.
If someone uses Catma I ("no idea is above question") to demand a platform for bigotry, Catma VIII says: no. If someone uses Catma III ("enough is not failure") to shame people in poverty for wanting more, Catma VIII says: no. The catmas serve people. People do not serve the catmas.
We are probably wrong about some of this. That's fine. The point is not to be right. The point is to be less wrong together, and to keep trying.
Isaac Asimov wrote: "When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
We are not claiming truth. We are claiming to be less wrong than the available alternatives, and we are committed to continuing to reduce our wrongness. This is the scientific method applied to ethics: make your best hypothesis, test it against reality, revise when the evidence demands it.
"Together" matters. One person being less wrong is philosophy. A community being less wrong together is a practice. We think the practice is the point.
Cromwell's Rule in Bayesian probability: never assign a probability of zero to any belief, because a zero prior can never be updated by evidence. The difference between a very small probability and zero is the difference between a skeptical mind and a closed one. We try to keep our minds skeptical. We try not to close them.
This is the foundational catma. Hierarchy is not a natural law — it's a technology, and like all technologies, it should be evaluated by its outcomes. The outcomes of hierarchy are well-documented: the people at the top accumulate resources and power, the people at the bottom are exploited, and the system generates justifications for why this is natural and inevitable.
The extension to other species is not sentimental. Arne Næss called it biospheric egalitarianism — the recognition that all living beings are nodes in the web of life with their own intrinsic value. You don't have to believe a mushroom has the same moral weight as your mother. You do have to stop acting like the rest of the living world is furniture.
"No idea is above question" includes these catmas. If you think Catma I is wrong, say so. That's Catma I working correctly.