Priorities

The following diagram depicts goals (hexagons) and an action (rectangle) that supports those goals (red arrow) for a group (oval). Solid lines identify the goals associated with the group.

Goals can be prioritized by members of the group along with supporting actions, and are defined as follows:

Happiness is maximizing life satisfaction of group members
Population is maximizing the number of group members
Longevity is maximizing the amount of time that the group can survive as a group

The following diagram shows how four basic groups are related, with areas proportional to the resources they consume in a given period of time (not to scale). Critical resources consumed by a group are provided by groups further out from the center.

Note the parallel between this and the Half-Earth Hypothesis.

In general, a group increases its happiness, population, and longevity by consuming resources used by an adjacent group, preferably by expanding outward from the center.

In a healthy system, all groups would change their consumption in synch with each other. A sustainable set of priorities for each "self" would be oriented toward achieving or maintaining this sychronicity by serving self, family, others, and other species as necessary while working toward maximum consumption (no decreases) for all.

For a procedure to evaluate priorities and ranking, see Priorities Evaluation.
For further discussion, see the blog posts "Groups, Goals, and Actions" and "Self Evaluation."