Subsidiarity

For Mormon Transhumanists, subsidiarity connects several commitments: the moral weight of agency, the expectation that people grow toward the capacities of God, and a view of community in which diverse members strengthen one another rather than collapse into sameness. It also offers a way to think about powerful technologies that can either concentrate decision-making in a few hands or spread competence widely.

Origins and Meaning

The principle received its best-known formal statement in Catholic social teaching, especially Pope Pius XI’s 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, which held that it is unjust for a larger body to take over functions that smaller communities can perform themselves. The European Union later adopted subsidiarity as a legal principle governing when the Union should act instead of its member states. In both settings the idea has two sides. Higher bodies should not absorb what lower bodies can do, and they have a positive duty to assist when lower bodies fall short.

That second side separates subsidiarity from simple localism or a general suspicion of large institutions. A family that cannot feed its children, a town that cannot defend itself against a flood, or a nation that cannot address a pandemic alone has a claim on wider help. Subsidiarity asks who can best act, and it expects the answer to change with circumstances and capacity.

Formal Structure Between Centralization and Anarchy

Subsidiarity requires structure. It stands between two failures. Centralization gathers decisions at the top, where distant authorities lack local knowledge and where those affected have little voice. Anarchy, in the sense of no binding order, leaves small communities without recourse when problems exceed their reach and leaves the vulnerable without protection from the strong.

Discussion within the Association has favored formal decentralized governance as the alternative: layered institutions with clear responsibilities, in which authority rests as close to persons as competence allows and wider bodies coordinate what must be coordinated. A related entry on Decentralization treats the distribution of power and infrastructure more broadly. Subsidiarity is narrower and more normative. It offers a rule for assigning responsibility within a structure, and it treats the higher body’s help as a service owed rather than a favor granted.

Agency and the Competence of the Person

The deepest root of subsidiarity in Latter-day Saint thought is agency. Scripture describes agency as central to the plan of salvation, and the Doctrine and Covenants teaches that people should not need to be commanded in all things but should act on their own initiative to bring about much good. A saying attributed to Joseph Smith, about teaching people correct principles and letting them govern themselves, expresses the same instinct in terms of governance.

Read through subsidiarity, these teachings imply that the person is the first unit of responsibility. A higher authority that decides for people what they could decide for themselves does them harm even when it decides well, because it withholds the exercise through which they grow. This is an interpretive claim, but it follows from a theology in which mortal life exists to develop the capacity for righteous judgment.

Agency in this sense is qualified. It depends on knowledge, ability, and conditions that make real choice possible. A person without education, health, or means has formal freedom but limited power to act on it. Subsidiarity therefore carries an obligation that runs upward and back down. Wider communities must build the capacities of persons and smaller groups so they can bear more responsibility over time. Help that leaves people permanently dependent fails the principle, and so does withholding help in the name of independence.

Priesthood, Quorums, and Common Consent

Latter-day Saint church structure contains clear expressions of subsidiarity alongside strong centralizing tendencies.

The Doctrine and Covenants organizes priesthood authority in quorums and councils and teaches that their decisions must be made in righteousness, with humility, patience, and charity, and with the unity of their members. Section 121 adds that no power or influence can or ought to be maintained by virtue of the priesthood. Influence must come only by persuasion, long-suffering, gentleness, meekness, and love unfeigned. Lincoln Cannon has written that priesthood authority, understood this way, is a possibility of power that becomes real power only when exercised with compassion. On that reading, authority that overrides agency empties itself. Authority that serves and strengthens others fulfills its purpose, and subsidiarity describes how that service should be distributed.

The principle of common consent, under which church actions are to be done by the agreement of members, points in the same direction. In current practice, however, sustaining votes are almost always unanimous, and doctrine, curriculum, and policy flow largely from central leadership through a correlated system. Common consent functions mostly as ratification and seldom as deliberation. Recent changes have moved some responsibility outward. The 2018 adjustments, including reorganized elders quorums, ministering in place of home teaching, and a greater emphasis on home-centered study, gave local leaders and families more room to adapt to their circumstances. Whether these changes mark a lasting turn toward subsidiarity or a limited delegation within a centralized model remains an open question. Mormon Transhumanists generally read the scriptural pattern as an invitation to make common consent more substantive over time.

The Body of Christ and the Danger of Uniformity

Paul’s image of the church as the body of Christ, in which eye, hand, and foot each have their own function and none can say to another that it has no need of it, gives subsidiarity a social shape. A body flourishes because its members differ. Discussion within the Association has drawn on this image to describe interdependence that honors a diversity of gifts.

This bears on how to read the scriptural ideal of Zion, whose people are described as being of one heart and one mind. Unity could be pursued as uniformity, with everyone made alike and decided for. Subsidiarity suggests a different unity: shared commitment and mutual care among persons and communities who keep their distinct callings and local judgment. Uniformity imposed from above would undercut the very diversity that makes a body able to function. On this view, centralization tends to produce sameness, and subsidiarity protects the differences that let members serve one another.

God’s Restraint: The Veil and the Prime Directive

Some Mormon Transhumanists extend subsidiarity into theology. They interpret God’s relationship to humanity as an example of the principle at cosmic scale. These are theological interpretations, not doctrinal claims.

The veil, the forgetting of premortal life that Latter-day Saint teaching associates with birth, can be read as a deliberate limit on divine presence. A God fully visible and constantly directing would leave little room for human judgment. By acting at a distance, God leaves people to work out what they can and offers help through inspiration, community, and covenant instead of compulsion. The comparison some draw is the “prime directive” of Star Trek, a fictional rule against advanced civilizations interfering in the development of less advanced ones. The analogy has limits, since Christian theology describes a God who does intervene, most centrally in Christ. But it captures the tension subsidiarity addresses: when should greater power act, and when does acting stunt the growth it means to serve?

Compassion sets the boundary. Subsidiarity never permits indifference to suffering a higher power could relieve. It asks that relief take forms that restore and expand the agency of those helped.

Technology and the Shifting Threshold of Competence

Subsidiarity assigns responsibility to the lowest competent level, so technology changes how the principle applies. Many tasks once required large institutions because only they could gather the information, capital, or expertise involved. As tools become cheaper and more capable, the threshold of competence moves downward. Communication networks let small groups coordinate across distances. Open software, inexpensive fabrication, distributed energy, and capable artificial intelligence may let households, congregations, and towns handle work that once demanded a state or corporation. Over decades, the set of things that must be centralized could shrink a great deal.

Improvement of this kind is not guaranteed, and the same technologies can push the other way. Platforms that gather data and attention can concentrate decision-making in a few firms. Ownership is the crucial variable here. Temporary barriers, such as a particular patent or the high early cost of a new tool, tend to fade as technology matures and spreads. Network effects, control over essential data, and closed infrastructure can sustain exclusion indefinitely, because the advantage feeds itself. Subsidiarity gives a test for evaluating technological futures: whether a technology makes persons and small communities more competent to govern themselves, or makes them more dependent on distant controllers.

Some problems will remain beyond local reach no matter how capable small groups become. Risks that cross every border, from engineered pathogens to misaligned artificial intelligence to planetary environmental change, call for coordination at the widest scale. Subsidiarity accepts this. It asks that global bodies take on what only they can do, and that they remain accountable to the persons and communities they serve.

Subsidiarity and Theosis

Mormon Transhumanists hope that humanity can grow, through grace and works, including technological works, toward the capacities of God. If God’s purpose is to raise others to share divine life, then the highest form of power is the power that makes others powerful. Subsidiarity names that pattern in institutional terms. Each level of authority helps the level beneath it become able to do more, so that responsibility can keep moving toward persons as they grow. In a world where technology greatly expands what persons and small communities can do, that responsibility will grow with it, and so will the need for the patience, persuasion, and love that scripture requires of anyone who holds power.