The Jubilee System#
Every machine needs maintenance. Every democracy needs regular elections. Every innovation economy needs periodic renewal — a structured reset that prevents the accumulation of systemic fragility from destroying the system it was meant to serve. The Jubilee System is that reset: a cyclical 50-year renewal process rooted in Leviticus 25, encoded in the structure of Revelation, and now formalized in mathematics that anyone can check.
The 7 aims of a Jubilee#
The preamble of the US Constitution articulates seven aims that define what a well-functioning society looks like. These aims are not uniquely American — they are universal aspirations that every civilization shares, whether it articulates them this way or not:
Form a more perfect union — keep improving how people work together across all differences.
Establish justice — ensure fair treatment that withstands scrutiny from all sides.
Ensure domestic tranquility — create conditions where people can live without fear of violence or chaos.
Provide for the common defense — guard the common goods that all life depends on.
Promote the general welfare — grow shared wellbeing, not just GDP.
Secure the blessings of liberty — protect freedom for everyone, not just the powerful.
For ourselves and our posterity — preserve all of the above for future generations, not just the present.
A Jubilee is any structured process that advances all seven aims simultaneously. Not just one. Not at the expense of others. All seven, for everyone. That is what makes it hard — and what makes it necessary.
The Jubilee System proposed here extends these 7 aims from the US to all of Earth. If these aims are worth pursuing for 330 million Americans, they are worth pursuing for 8 billion humans. The question is not whether but how.
Why the world needs Jubilees now#
Humanity currently has no structured process for periodic renewal at civilizational scale. The consequences are visible everywhere:
Wealth concentrates until it distorts every institution it touches — including the democratic processes meant to check it.
Debts accumulate — financial, ecological, social — until they trigger crises that could have been averted by earlier resets.
Innovation stagnates when incumbents capture the systems meant to foster competition, turning creative destruction into creative self-destruction.
Nuclear arsenals persist under hair-trigger doctrines maintained by nations that cannot imagine a structural alternative to Mutually Assured Destruction.
Leviticus 25 prescribed a radical solution: every 50 years, return land, release debts, and let the system breathe. Ancient Israel apparently never fully implemented it. Humanity has now skipped nearly 70 such cycles. The accumulated systemic fragility is showing.
The capitalism-communism debate has consumed the 20th century without resolution because both sides are partially right. Capitalism excels at innovation but concentrates power. Communism seeks equity but kills innovation. Neither has a built-in mechanism for periodic self-correction. A Jubilee System provides that mechanism — cyclical renewal that preserves innovation while preventing the concentration that destroys it.
Revelation as innovation algorithm#
The book of Revelation is widely read as a divine doomsday clock — an unavoidable bloodbath of retribution on Judgement Day. Many devout readers see it this way, and they are not entirely wrong. But this blood-drenched reading misses something essential.
Revelation appears to be the most elaborate Rorschach test ever devised. What you see in it reveals as much about your own assumptions as it does about the text itself.
LLoL reads the apocalyptic imagery as encoding principles of innovation — systematic processes for rescuing the world from its worst outcomes by learning from Reality, much as scientists do at their best.
LLoL argues that the doomsday patterns described in Revelation correspond to what this site calls the BABL algorithm — and that the renewal principles also encoded in Revelation offer a workable path forward: cyclical renewal built on ancient wisdom and modern science.
Why Revelation?
For secular readers: you don’t need to accept Revelation as divinely inspired to find value in its structure. The claim here is analytical — that Revelation encodes a sophisticated algorithm for managing innovation cycles, and that this algorithm can be evaluated on its own merits regardless of one’s theological commitments. See Mathematical Theology for the formal treatment.
The two attractors: BABL and ZION#
The formal models developed on this site show that any self-assessing system has exactly two long-term trajectories:
BABL — Blindly Assuming Blind Leveraging. A system that caches old results without revalidation, oversimplifies what is complex, overcomplicates what is simple, and overreaches beyond what it actually knows. The death-trifecta of OSCR (OverSimplifying, OverComplicating, OverReaching) drives any system toward collapse. This is the default trajectory — the doomsday path.
ZION — Zoning, Investigating, Organizing, Navigating. A system that honestly assesses itself (“I do not yet fully know”), corrects its errors, expands its scope through gentle kind reasonable exploration, and periodically renews itself. The life-trifecta — gentle, kind, reasonable — keeps the system growing. This is the Jubilee path.
The choice between BABL and ZION is not a one-time decision. It is a continuous process of self-correction. A Jubilee is the structured periodic event that forces the question: are we still on the ZION path, or have we drifted into BABL without noticing?
Every person, every organization, every nation faces this question. The Jubilee System proposes answering it honestly, transparently, and on a regular schedule — rather than waiting for the accumulated drift to produce a catastrophe.
How the Jubilee System works#
The Jubilee System operates as a cyclical renewal process with three interlocking components:
1. Periodic reset (the 50-year cycle)
Inspired by Leviticus 25, the cycle provides structured moments for reassessing and redistributing resources, opportunities, and obligations. This is not forced redistribution — it is a scheduled review that asks: have the systems meant to serve everyone drifted into serving only some? Where the answer is yes, the Jubilee provides mechanisms for gentle kind reasonable correction.
2. Continuous assessment (the innovation economy)
Between Jubilees, the system operates as a self-stabilizing innovation economy — one where competition drives improvement, but where the rules of competition themselves are subject to review. The assessment uses metrics aligned with the 7 aims: not just economic growth, but justice, tranquility, welfare, liberty, and posterity.
3. Transparent evaluation (the Great Jubilee Race)
Different nations, cultures, and organizational structures compete to demonstrate which approach best delivers on the 7 aims. This is a genuinely open question: will capitalist democracies lead, or will the authority vested in other systems give them an edge? Will small nations outperform large ones? Will decentralized approaches beat centralized ones?
The point of the Race is not to declare a winner and impose a model. It is to generate evidence — transparent, reproducible, publicly auditable evidence — about what actually works for everyone over the long term.
The Great Jubilee Race#
How do you measure whether a Jubilee implementation is working?
This is perhaps the hardest question in all of social science. It is easy to measure GDP. It is much harder to measure whether a society is genuinely advancing justice, tranquility, and liberty for all its members — including those at the margins.
LLoL proposes that the answer lies in a mathematical framework he developed a decade before he realized its application to Jubilees.
The Lazy Updating connection#
By accident or divine providence, LLoL’s earlier research as a computational biologist led his lab to produce a 2014 paper in the Journal of Chemical Physics (Ehlert & Loewe, J. Chem. Phys. 141:204109) whose mathematical structure has striking parallels to the problem of evaluating diverse organizational implementations of Jubilee Systems.
The “Lazy Updating” algorithm solves a specific problem: in a large network of interdependent components, how do you ensure that vital updates propagate efficiently without requiring centralized control? The answer: track dependencies, defer updates that can safely wait, and prioritize updates that affect the most downstream components.
Only in 2024 did LLoL realize that this algorithm — designed for managing biological data pipelines — maps directly onto the problem of evaluating Jubilee implementations across different organizational structures. Each nation’s approach to Jubilee renewal can be modeled as a network of interdependent policies. The Lazy Updating algorithm provides a way to:
Record outcomes of Jubilee-based operations across diverse implementations without imposing a single framework.
Compare efficiency across different organizational structures (democratic, authoritarian, mixed) using the same metrics.
Identify which updates matter most — which policy changes have the greatest downstream impact on the 7 aims.
This requires computational infrastructure that does not yet exist. Building it is one of ResearchCity’s core missions, and it depends on LLoL getting his Evolvix language development work back on track — the same work whose source materials are currently in storage.
Historical roots#
The Jubilee concept originates in Leviticus 25, where God instructs Israel to observe a radical economic reset every 50 years:
Land returns to its original family allocation.
Debts are forgiven and indentured servants are released.
The land itself rests — a year of ecological renewal.
The purpose was not charity. It was structural: preventing the concentration of wealth and power that would eventually destroy the community from within. Every generation would start with a meaningful chance, not a pre-determined disadvantage.
Historical evidence suggests that ancient Israel never fully implemented these Jubilees. The consequences — conquest, exile, destruction — are the subject of most of the Hebrew Bible’s prophetic literature. The prophets were, in modern terms, systems analysts warning that skipping scheduled maintenance would crash the system.
Debt-jubilee traditions appear across civilizations — from Mesopotamian misharum edicts to modern bankruptcy law. But none have been implemented at the scale and regularity that Leviticus 25 envisions. The Jubilee System proposed here aims to change that — not by imposing ancient law literally, but by extracting its structural wisdom and implementing it with modern tools.
From algorithm to practice#
How does an algorithm encoded in an ancient text become a working system in the modern world?
Step 1: Formalize the claims. The matheology section of this site translates theological claims into formal axiom systems that can be checked for consistency. The JUB axioms (ax15–ax25) formalize the conditions under which innovation economies need Jubilee resets.
Step 2: Test adversarially. The formal models are subjected to TEMPER FORGE — a structured adversarial testing process that attempts to break the claims. Results so far: the core structure has held. See Results So Far for the current state.
Step 3: Build the infrastructure. This requires its own explanation — see ResearchCity: rewiring the innovation engine below.
Step 4: Run the Race. Different nations and organizations implement their own versions of Jubilee renewal. The Lazy Updating framework provides the measurement infrastructure. The results are public, transparent, and subject to ongoing review.
Step 5: Iterate. Every 50-year cycle produces evidence about what worked and what didn’t. The next cycle incorporates that evidence. The system improves itself — or it fails and the evidence shows why.
This is not utopian fantasy. It is a structured research program with falsifiable predictions, transparent methods, and a built-in mechanism for self-correction. If it doesn’t work, the evidence will show that too.
ResearchCity: rewiring the innovation engine#
Here is not the place to describe ResearchCity properly. Some of the PDFs in LLoL’s Good News Pack try to offer a cartoon overview of what the 7–8 stage process for scaling up ResearchCity may look like. What matters here is the why.
Why datageddon leads to Armageddon#
It will be impossible to organize proper Jubilees without building the 1600 ResearchCity talent stadia required for offering gentle kind reasonable decision-support — locally and globally — about how to best implement Jubilees. Because Jubilee-organizing is primarily a big-tech data problem that requires efficiency of scale in order to avoid what data scientists call datageddon.
A datageddon can be formally defined as any state of data disorganization that makes it impossible to connect the dots that matter most in order to prevent a corresponding disaster. The disaster could, by definition, be averted if the data had been sufficiently organized in time to make the right connections. Yet the lack of insight — induced by the BABL algorithm of Blindly Assuming Blind Leveraging — makes averting that disaster impossible by definition.
Note
This definition is not circular, for the same reason that “survival of the fittest” is not a tautology in evolutionary biology. Reality chooses one path into the future to the exclusion of all others. That path determines whether a datageddon was resolved in time or whether it triggered its corresponding disaster. The definition becomes predictive — not merely retrospective — when combined with BABL dynamics: a system running BABL will systematically fail to organize the data needed to avert its own disasters, because the BABL algorithm actively degrades the information quality required for self-correction. Whether Reality selects a path where the datageddon is resolved depends on whether anyone cares enough to organize the data against BABL’s resistance.
That is why all BABL systems eventually fail in some sudden catastrophic way at a moment that insiders fail to realize is coming. In other words, their “Armageddon-disaster” is preprogrammed. It could be averted if anyone cared enough, but because nobody does in BABL, BABL always falls — regardless of how sophisticated it was, what it built, or how invincible it appeared. The outcome of institutional corruption is always the same, even though the mechanisms for getting there always vary in detail.
The rewiring discovery#
What LLoL did was to decipher the abstract underpinning algorithms that drive this corruption until it reaches its logical conclusion in utter self-destruction. Yet that would be depressing news if this was all there was to LLoL’s research.
As it turns out, the same sources of insight that exceptionally clarified how the BABL algorithm works also pointed to what LLoL calls the ZION algorithm for gentle kind reasonably Zoning, Investigating, Organizing, Navigating. The remarkable thing is that the ZION algorithm uses the same innovation engine that drives BABL — albeit by wiring it differently, the ZION algorithm drives innovation not down the hill and over a cliff, but up the hill to keep overcoming problems in sustainable ways.
By accident or divine providence (who knows?), LLoL discovered a way for how to rewire that innovation engine from its knowledge-faking polarity (BABL) to its life-giving polarity (ZION). The purpose of ResearchCity is to understand that wiring and to ensure that the great innovation engine of Reality remains wired for life and is no longer allowed to corrupt itself.
History as a debugging manual#
The past history of humanity can be re-interpreted as a long sequence of debugging test experiments illustrating all the ways that do not work. If so, it makes for an excellent systems documentation manual for helping to keep innovation on track — albeit only for those who have learned to read it. All others are doomed to live in the “friendly fire” that randomly kills life and innovation in BABL.
Scaling up ResearchCity#
Here is not the place to explain in detail the vision for how to scale up ResearchCity over the 7–8 well-defined stages that LLoL identified. It is part of its vision that ResearchCity plans must be refined after every scale-up stage according to whatever will have been learned at that stage. Thus, to blindly assume details that cannot yet be known would turn such an effort into yet another exercise in BABL corruption. Yet such decay can only be averted by a proper grounding in mathematical theology.
LLoL cannot yet offer an integrated working prototype. He can point to different fragmented experiences seen in history. Yet, LLoL can offer to kick off a public global review of his matheology research in order to test if it can be made sufficiently reliable to proceed with scaling up a gentle kind reasonable prototype.
A good part of that review is likely best seen as “Stage 0” of the scale-up process, because it helps to define and prepare what needs to be sufficiently clear and understood at Stage 1. Only at Stage 1 can the first real-life test of integrated matheology theories start at a small enough scale to stay manageable: a small integrated research community of 7–8 people who live together for 6 effective months, supported by all the infrastructure required to evaluate their real-life experiences in mathematical theology.
Starting ResearchCity#
To get ResearchCity started, it is essential to establish its first talent stadium dedicated to preserving life on Earth through gentle kind reasonable decision-making. To prevent “influence-shopping” by the rich — a subtle and powerful form of corruption — contributions per person are limited to ~$8/person/year and remain constitutionally bound to stay voluntary. The same is true for all stadia in ResearchCity.
There is no point in talking about later stages, because each stage requires a full review and reworking of all the plans in light of everything that has been learned. In order to start efficiently, LLoL has identified 12 core research arenas envisioned to grow into research talent stadia that work like a particularly well-integrated unit of services that must come together in order to maintain near optimal efficiencies of scale while scaling up ResearchCity.
Yet, to make things a bit more tangible for getting the ball rolling, LLoL came up with the following practical proposal.
LLoL is asking all who wish to avert accidental nuclear winter to form a coalition of the willing by contributing ~$8/person/year in global funding in order to efficiently review the overall plans and to start implementing the first stage — assuming that humanity is interested in a rigorous assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the matheology framework presented on this site.
As soon as incoming funds allow, LLoL will start to hire a workforce of exceptionally qualified people who are passionate about further exploring how mathematical theology can inform self-stabilizing innovation ecosystems.
To illustrate what this might look like, LLoL asked Claude to draft an organizational plan based on the mathematical theology Claude Code helped to develop. The result is of course very tentative and will require much tuning, but it is still informative of what a reasonable start for ResearchCity might possibly look like at Stage 0 in preparation for setting up a well-organized Stage 1, capable of learning all that needs to be learned in preparation of Stage 2. These preparations are essential in order to maintain the ambitious schedule of stages, currently envisioned as being 6 effective months long, with one effective month of setup time and one effective month of wrap-up time to ensure all lessons learned are well integrated. How effective months scale to calendar months remains to be seen, but it is clear from the start that without the thorough foundational preparation work of Stage 0, all other stages will have been derailed before they ever had a chance to start.
Therefore, if sufficient funding and global interest exist to subvert the current game of self-corruption, LLoL proposes to start Stage 0 by inviting applications from exceptional candidates who are excited to re-envision the world through a lens of mathematical theology. The brief descriptions for 153 positions in this early draft organizational plan are designed to work across 17 LinkSpaces, which are ResearchCity’s equivalents for “departments” (albeit redesigned to limit typical de-part-ing processes). LLoL trusts that if indeed the time has come for implementing this, both will be available: the people who are passionate about finding a better way of doing things and the funds required to enable these people to work efficiently toward building that innovation highway in the world’s harsh innovation deserts.
Getting involved#
The Jubilee System cannot be built by one person. It requires:
Funding — buy in to form a coalition of the willing, starting at ~$8/person/year.
Review — adversarial testing of the formal claims by independent experts.
Participation — the Great Jubilee Race needs nations and organizations willing to compete.
Feedback — FeedbackFlow from anyone who sees a problem or an improvement.
The question is not whether the world can afford to try this. The question is whether it can afford not to — given the actuarial evidence for what happens if nothing changes.