Omegaism
Hi. I'm Tobias Fankhauser.
But this isn't really about me. Or at least it shouldn't remain that way. This is about us.
I put my name here mostly because I want you to know who is actually behind this. There isn't some large organisation, think tank or mysterious group writing these pages. At the moment it's mostly me, Claude, and ChatGPT.
New here?
Omegaism right now
We are at an early collaborative stage. Contributions require an accepted Swiss pilot invitation. Formal Verein membership and personal AI are optional.
Discussions and living documents are implemented. Dedicated Projects, proposal and experiment workflows, and automatic AI organization remain proposals. Public release is separate from editing or institutional adoption.
In short: Omegaism is an attempt to make our investigation of reality deliberate and collective—and to use what we discover to improve how we live.
That means asking what we are, what we can know, what makes life worth living, and whether the societies and institutions we've inherited are really the best arrangements we can devise. Rather than treating any answer as final, the idea is to investigate, try things, learn from what happens, and revise.
So far, that has produced the Reality Primer, several investigations into society and other questions, and a platform where people can examine and improve the work. None of it is a finished answer.
So how did I get here?
Before any of that, though, there's you.
You're here.
Reading this on some screen, probably in the middle of an otherwise fairly normal day. Maybe you're tired. Maybe you have something else you should be doing. Maybe you just clicked a link and are already wondering what this weird thing is supposed to be.
And yet, if you actually stop for a second, the situation we're in is completely absurd.
You're alive. You can see things, feel things, remember yesterday, imagine tomorrow, get annoyed, fall in love, wonder what any of this is, and somehow know that all of it is happening to you.
I don't know what you ultimately are. I don't know what I ultimately am either. I don't know whether reality is exactly what it looks like from in here. But I do know that whatever this whole thing turns out to be, we're somehow getting to experience it.
And that alone feels worth taking seriously.
Somehow there is a universe. Somehow it produced stars, planets, life, us. And somehow these strange animals eventually learned enough about the place they found themselves in to build telescopes, antibiotics, particle accelerators, computers, spacecraft, and now machines we can actually talk to.
That is insane.
And mostly we just got used to it.
We wake up, check our phones, go to work, worry about money, answer emails, buy things, argue about politics, plan holidays, and search for the next thing that might finally feel extraordinary while living inside something that already is.
That is roughly where Omegaism starts for me.
I started wondering what we should actually do with this opportunity.
We have become unbelievably capable. Yet I look around and a lot of what we do with that capability makes very little sense to me.
People need care while trained people who would like to provide it are told there is no budget. We build systems that become better at selling us what holds our attention, appetite or dependence, even when that works against what we actually want for ourselves. We build technology that could save us time and then somehow seem to become busier. We know that many of the things we produce and consume damage the environment we depend on, and yet every individual company, country and person has perfectly understandable reasons to continue.
None of this means that money is fake, markets are useless, governments are evil, or that somebody secretly designed the world badly.
A lot of what exists clearly works well enough to have survived and spread. Much of it emerged gradually under particular conditions rather than because anyone sat down and asked what the best possible arrangement would be.
That history matters. It also doesn't answer what we should keep, what we should change, or whether today's conditions allow something better.
How much of what we currently call impossible is genuinely impossible? How much is scarce because reality makes it scarce? How much is difficult because millions of people want incompatible things? And how much only looks impossible because of the particular way we currently coordinate who can do what, for whom, and under which conditions?
That larger question was already Omegaism for me: why should humanity mostly accept whatever history happened to produce instead of deliberately trying to build the best version we can?
The first thing I actually built was the Reality Primer.
The reason was simple. None of us starts from scratch.
We grow up with some mixture of our parents' beliefs, whatever school happened to teach us, the culture and country we were born into, religion or its absence, social class, friends, books, television, social media, algorithms, teachers we happened to meet, and whatever else crossed our path.
Then at some point we call someone an adult and expect them to make decisions about health, work, money, relationships, politics, technology, children, ethics and what they want to do with their life.
That seems like a fairly strange way to initialize a mind.
The idea of the Primer is to build the best starting map of reality we currently can.
Not a final worldview. Not something you're supposed to believe because Omegaism says so.
More like an inheritance: here is what humanity currently seems to know about experience, knowledge, the physical world, life, human beings, society, the cosmos and practical life. Here is where the evidence is strong. Here are the models we're using. Here are the competing interpretations. Here are the things we still don't understand.
I want it to be as objective as we can make it, without pretending that observation, scientific models, philosophical interpretation and value choices are all the same kind of thing.
The current Primer is deliberately structured as six books with twelve chapters each. It obviously cannot contain everything. The point is to build a coherent path through the territory: enough structure to give someone a serious starting point without pretending the map is the territory.
The goal isn't that people come out of it with the same worldview.
I hope they come out better able to build their own, understand why they believe what they believe, see where they're uncertain, and notice when an argument is nonsense, including an Omegaism argument.
And then I want what they discover to flow back into the same commons.
Correct something. Add what is missing. Replace a bad explanation. Bring knowledge from somewhere the current version doesn't understand.
If you know a part of reality better than the Primer does, I want the Primer to learn from you.
Ideally, every generation inherits a better starting point than the one before it.
And if Omegaism ever becomes a real society, I would like this to be one of its defaults: every new person inherits the best map we can currently offer, together with the tools and permission to question it, correct it, and eventually add to it.
The same larger question also made me look more closely at the systems we already live inside.
I started pulling on that thread.
That became The Inversion.
Then came the next question: if some of this really is structural, how could we do it better? What other approaches are even available? What has already been tried, why did those attempts fail or converge back toward the systems they were trying to escape, and what does that teach us about a redesign?
That became The Alternative.
Then I wanted to make those lessons concrete enough to see what the inside of such a system might actually look like.
That became The Society.
And the questions kept spreading.
What should education actually be for?
What makes a life better?
What does it mean that we experience anything at all?
What should we do about death?
What do we owe people who don't exist yet?
At what point does a shared investigation into reality, meaning, life, death, community and what we should become start doing some of the things religion has historically done?
I don't have final answers to those questions.
There is now just a growing pile of attempts.
So who am I to do this?
Who am I to sit down and write about how society could work?
Why should my view matter more than yours?
It shouldn't.
I'm one person. I have one life, one body, one education, one set of experiences and an enormous number of blind spots.
There are things in these documents about healthcare, economics, childhood, governance, law, psychology, technology, relationships and many other areas where somebody else has spent thirty years actually doing the work and I have not.
Even if I somehow became an expert in every one of those fields, the problem would still remain.
I am not you.
I don't know what your life feels like from the inside. I don't know which things matter enormously to you and barely register for me. I don't know what I would discover if I had your body, your childhood, your profession, your relationships, your fears, your abilities or your responsibilities.
And that matters if the thing we're trying to think about is a society that is supposed to work for the people living inside it.
If my own starting point is that conscious experience matters, then I can't seriously turn around and treat everyone else's experience as something I am qualified to specify on their behalf.
So I don't think the fact that I started Omegaism gives me some special right to decide where it ends up.
If anything, the more seriously I take the ideas behind it, the less defensible it becomes for Omegaism to remain my answer to the world.
It needs other people.
Not followers.
People who know things I don't.
People who have lived things I haven't.
People who disagree.
Maybe you're a nurse and I completely misunderstand what actually prevents good care.
Maybe you're an economist and one of the central arguments in The Inversion is embarrassingly naive.
Maybe you're a parent and something in the education framework sounds wonderful on paper and terrible when applied to a real six-year-old.
Maybe you've lived in a commune, a cooperative, a religion, a startup, a refugee camp, a hospital, a farm, or a family completely unlike mine.
Maybe you're just reading something and thinking: Tobias, this is bullshit.
I want to know why.
A lot of this was made with AI
I use AI a lot.
Really a lot.
ChatGPT has been involved in almost everything here. Claude has been involved in plenty of it too.
I argue with them. I ask them to research things, find holes, challenge assumptions and rewrite sections. Sometimes a conversation changes one paragraph. Sometimes it changes an entire document.
It has allowed me to explore far more than I could have done alone.
It also means some of this may be beautifully written bullshit.
AI is very good at making things sound finished. A slightly bad assumption can turn into fifty elegant pages before anyone notices where the reasoning went wrong.
Some parts of the material have also developed faster with AI than I have personally been able to verify every line of them.
So please don't read the size or polish of this project as evidence that it is correct.
The current material is simply how far I got.
What I actually want to build
The phrase “ideal society” makes me slightly uncomfortable because it sounds like somebody should already know what ideal means.
I don't.
But I think we can ask.
What would a society look like if we genuinely tried to make life go as well as we can for the beings living it?
What should we keep because it already works?
What should we change?
How would we know whether the change actually helped?
What happens when two groups sincerely disagree?
Can we try both?
Could work be organised more directly around what actually needs doing, what people can do, and what they care enough to do well?
How do we deal honestly with the work almost nobody wants to do?
Could companies exist to solve problems and be happy when the problem disappears?
Could education help children understand reality and themselves rather than mainly preparing them to fit into whatever economy happens to exist?
Could institutions become better at noticing their own mistakes instead of getting better at defending them?
Could we become more capable without becoming increasingly insane?
I don't know.
But those seem like questions worth taking seriously.
Especially because the future does not wait until we have finished arguing about it.
Governments make decisions. Companies make decisions. Investors make decisions. People with unusually large amounts of money, political power, technical capability or control over infrastructure make decisions that shape what happens to everyone else.
Some of them may be brilliant. Some may be well-intentioned. Some may be disastrously wrong.
They still aren't you.
Their wealth or authority does not make their experience more real than yours.
So if the future is going to be shaped anyway, I would rather have far more of us involved in figuring out what we're actually trying to shape it toward.
For ourselves.
For the people we love.
For children who currently have no say in the world we're constructing around them.
And for whoever comes after us.
How to take part
Start wherever you care.
You don't need to read everything.
You definitely don't need to agree with everything.
Challenge a claim.
Add evidence.
Bring professional knowledge.
Point out something the software or organisation does that contradicts what the project says it believes.
Improve a Primer chapter. Correct the map. Add something important that is missing.
Propose a better mechanism.
Build something.
If two ideas can't be settled by arguing and both can safely be tried, maybe we try both.
And if you don't want to work through hundreds of pages yourself, connect your own AI through the MCP and let it help you investigate the project.
Ask what Omegaism currently says about something you care about. Ask why a rule exists. Ask whether somebody already raised your objection. Ask it to find contradictions.
I'd rather give you access to the material than have an official Omegaism AI telling you what you're supposed to think about it.
Use your own tools.
Then decide for yourself.
What do you care about?
Sign in to search the material available to your account. Public texts remain open to read.
Sign in to searchNothing here is sacred
Everything here should be able to change.
The Inversion can be wrong.
The Alternative can be wrong.
The Society can be wrong.
The Reality Primer can be wrong.
The education framework can be wrong.
The statutes can contain bad ideas.
This page can be wrong.
Omegaism itself can turn out to be a dead end.
I would obviously prefer that not to happen after spending this much time on it.
But if that's where the evidence leads, that's where I want to go.
Otherwise this becomes exactly the kind of thing I don't want to build: another worldview that started with investigation and eventually became something people felt obliged to defend.
That is also why revisions and discussions matter.
If somebody finds a problem and the text changes because of it, I don't want the criticism to disappear.
I want us to be able to see what used to be there, who objected, what changed, why it changed, and whether the objection was actually resolved.
Over time, I hope this becomes less like a collection of polished texts and more like a living memory of the investigation.
What exists
There are the current source texts.
There is the Reality Primer.
There is the education work.
There are statutes and the Swiss Verein.
There is software.
There are discussions and working documents. Proposals can be developed in them; dedicated Projects, proposal workflows and coordinated experiments are still to be built.
And there is a growing body of questions we haven't answered.
The documents are starting points.
The Inversion is one attempt to understand some structural problems in our current economic coordination.
The Alternative asks what previous alternatives ran into, what other directions might be possible, and what their failures can teach us about trying again differently.
The Society is the current attempt to make some of those lessons concrete enough to imagine and eventually test.
The Reality Primer is an attempt to assemble the best starting map of reality we currently can: what seems well established, what remains uncertain, which interpretations compete, and enough structure for someone to continue investigating for themselves.
Other work deals with education, consciousness, religion, governance, law, organisations and whatever else the investigation reaches.
Eventually I would like this to feel less like a set of documents and more like one growing corpus.
Claims connected to evidence.
Objections connected to the claims they challenge.
Experiments connected to the ideas they test.
Decisions connected to the discussions that produced them.
Software connected to the rules it implements.
Projects connected to actual needs.
And enough history left behind that you can ask why something currently looks the way it does and trace the answer back.
The Primer should be one way into that growing body of understanding, not a boundary around it.
Where this goes
I don't know.
Maybe some central ideas collapse under serious scrutiny.
Maybe Omegaism remains a small project and discovers a few useful things.
Maybe parts of it turn into companies, schools, shared infrastructure, research projects or ways of organising work.
Maybe people take it in directions I strongly disagree with and discover something I missed.
Maybe it eventually becomes large enough that nobody particularly cares who originally wrote this page.
I'd quite like that.
What I care about is the question underneath it.
We're here.
We have this strange chance to experience a piece of existence for however long we get.
Humanity has already managed things that would have looked like magic for most of our history.
I don't see why the organisation of our shared lives should be the one thing we're afraid to seriously reconsider.
So this is my starting point.
Have a look.
Break it where it's wrong.
Add what I'm missing.
And if enough of it survives, maybe we can build something worth living in.