our Values

Why choose Solidarity, Sustainability and Freedom as our 3 core values?

Here is a top-down explanation¹. First let me quote another, more famous motto:

Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité

… which I also like. We have 66% overlap.

Both triads address fundamental questions of how humans can live well together:

Freedom/Liberté appears in both, recognizing that autonomy and self-determination remain essential to human action and interaction.

Solidarity/Fraternité appears in both, acknowledging that we’re stronger together and that mutual support makes collective life possible and meaningful.

The Key Difference

The French motto includes Égalité (Equality), while ours includes Sustainability. This difference reflects our different historical moments:

France in 1789

The existential threat was social injustice: monarchy, aristocratic privilege, systematic inequality. Equality needed to be explicitly fought for because the system actively enforced hierarchy. Meanwhile, resources seemed limitless: under 1 billion people globally, vast unexplored territories, abundant forests and clean water, pre-industrial energy use. Sustainability wasn’t yet a concern, either in awareness or as an objective problem.

Our World Today

We’ve established (imperfectly but genuinely) that equality and human rights are values worth pursuing. Meanwhile, we now face a different existential threat: we’re consuming planetary resources at rates that threaten civilization itself. Sustainability has become the crisis that equality was in 1789: it must be named explicitly because planetary boundaries are real and we’re exceeding them.

Why Equality Remains Present

Equality doesn’t disappear from our values – it’s logically inherent in solidarity. True mutual support and collective care require fairness and respect for each person’s dignity and needs. This is why we practice social pricing, share all responsibilities, and ensure every voice matters in our decisions.

But sustainability must now stand as its own pillar because it addresses both our boat-level survival (managing finite water, energy, food, space) and our global responsibility (living within our fair share, minimizing our impact on communities and ecosystems we encounter).

Two Triads, Two Eras

The French motto addressed the crises of their time. Our values address the crises of ours. Both recognize that human flourishing requires balancing individual freedom with collective responsibility – we’ve simply updated what that responsibility demands in the 21st century.

Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité inspired revolutions and constitutions across centuries.

Solidarity, Sustainability and Freedom guides how we sail, live, and engage with the world.

ask me about the bottom-up explanation ↩