What if everything we thought we knew about conflict and cooperation was backwards?

For centuries, philosophers, economists, and scientists have asked: why do humans cooperate? The question assumes that conflict is natural and cooperation is the puzzle requiring explanation. This groundbreaking book inverts that assumption entirely.

Drawing on evolutionary game theory, Nobel Prize-winning research on commons governance, and evidence from biology to artificial intelligence, A Unified Theory of Self-Organizing Systems presents a radical reframing: in peer systems with shared environments and repeated interaction, cooperation is the default. Antagonism is the anomaly that requires explanation.

Boris Kriger presents four interconnected laws governing self-organizing systems:

Law Zero: Cooperation emerges as the statistically dominant and dynamically stable configuration in peer systems. Antagonism requires continuous external energy to maintain.

Law One: Unobstructed cooperative dynamics yield efficient self-organization. External control that ignores local information typically makes things worse.

Law Two: System viability requires less complexity than commonly assumed. Much observed complexity is discretionary overconstraint.

Law Three: Functional systems generate low observable signals while failures generate high signals, creating systematic misperception of how well things actually work.

The cooperative potential of humanity is vast. The question is whether we will identify and remove what obstructs it.