Premises of This Inquiry
In what follows, the author develops a line of inquiry into large-scale structures of the world, such as value, assets, money, government, and markets.
However, this work does not proceed as a specialized discussion grounded in existing academic disciplines—such as philosophy, intellectual history, economics, or political science.
It neither presupposes nor relies upon those established bodies of knowledge.
The author’s position is deliberately simple.
This inquiry attempts to read and understand the world using only three tools, outlined below.
1. A Bird’s-Eye View (BEV)
The stance the author values most is not an attempt to explain the world all at once, but rather to take a step back and observe it from above—a Bird’s-Eye View.
A Bird’s-Eye View does not focus on the fine details of individual phenomena.
Instead, it seeks a distance at which the interweaving of relationships and the emergence of structures naturally come into view.
This perspective does not depend on specialized knowledge or expert training.
Rather, it is a position that anyone can adopt.
The author himself begins this inquiry by observing the world from such a vantage point.
Once this bird’s-eye perspective is established, the following three perspectives and the BS structure begin to operate naturally.
2. Three Perspectives
The world is observed through the following three perspectives, used as conceptual yardsticks:
- Fiction
(Yuval Noah Harari: the human capacity to endow the world with meaning) - Domain
(Markus Gabriel: the idea that the world consists of multiple domains of objects) - Relation
(Carlo Rovelli: the view that existence appears as a network of relations)
Using these three perspectives, this inquiry surveys worldly phenomena from above.
3. The Basic Structure of the Balance Sheet (BS)
The author does not approach the balance sheet (BS) as an accounting specialist, but rather as a simple structure that captures fundamental distinctions common to the world at large, such as:
- inside / outside
- self / other
- stock / flow
In this work, only the following three structural features of the balance sheet are used:
- Debits and credits always balance
- The credit side is divided into internal (one’s own) and external (others’) components
- All objects of description can be classified as either
stock structures (self-contained structures) or
flow structures (dependent structures)
On Distance from Specialized Knowledge
The author does not possess systematic training in philosophy, intellectual history, or economics.
This work does not presuppose those disciplines, nor does it explicitly reference them.
Instead, it adopts the position that the world can be read using only the minimal tools described above (1–3).
In this sense, the present work is not a contribution to any specialized academic field.
Rather, it is a proposal of a structural perspective on how to view the world.
At the same time, this work has one additional, modest intention:
to reaffirm a simple but often overlooked fact—that anyone, regardless of background or expertise, can begin to read and understand the world on their own, starting from a few fundamental points.
The author himself proceeds from such a position.
For this reason, it is the author’s hope that this work may serve for the reader as well as a tool for seeing the world with one’s own eyes.