When the Norm Returns to Those Who Live It

From Body-Territory to the Jiwasa-State

Every norm that reaches a Body-Territory came, at some point, from other Body-Territories.

A Constitution does not write itself. A law does not appear spontaneously. A regulation does not interpret the world on its own.

Before the norm existed, there were people perceiving problems, choosing words, negotiating values, and imagining consequences.

Then something curious happens.

The norm separates itself from those who produced it and returns to millions of people as:

“It is the rule.”

And those who receive it must understand it, obey it, contest it, or live with its consequences.

In Blog 7, we proposed that mined data must be restituted to the Body-Territory.

Now we advance another hypothesis:

perhaps the norm must also be restituted to those who live it.

We do not know a State without Body-Territories

We can imagine territory without a State.

But we do not know a State without bodies.

Body-Territories write, interpret, execute, obey, enforce, and contest norms.

We therefore propose, as a BrainLatam Hypothesis, investigating the Body-Territory as the constitutive and indivisible unit of the State.

This is not a legal definition.

It is a change of perspective.

The Body-Territory ceases to appear merely as someone administered by the State.

We belong to the State. We are part of the State.

Long before we read a Constitution, parts of the collective order have already entered us.

Through language.

Through family.

Through school.

Through beliefs and non-beliefs.

Through customs.

Through the boundaries we learn.

Social and legal norms are not equivalent. But culture and language participate in how we understand authority, rights, obligations, and belonging.

Part of the State has already entered the Body-Territory before we even know how to call it the State.

If it entered, perhaps it can also return transformed.

What if we started with the wrong question about ourselves?

There is a question that precedes the norm itself:

why do we imagine that we need so many rules produced by other Body-Territories to organize our coexistence?

An influential tradition in political philosophy, associated with Thomas Hobbes, emphasized the risk of human conflict in the absence of a common authority.

That image remains present in the way we imagine institutions: without sufficient control, people would tend toward selfishness, violence, or disorder.

Rutger Bregman offers a contemporary challenge to this view in Humankind: A Hopeful History, questioning the so-called “veneer theory”: the idea that civilization is merely a superficial layer covering an essentially selfish human nature.

We do not need to replace:

“human beings are bad”

with:

“human beings are good.”

That would simply replace one reduction with another.

The Body-Territory can cooperate and compete. Care and exploit. Protect and harm. And it can change.

Our question is more interesting:

what if our institutions have overestimated how much we need to be controlled and underestimated how much we are capable of cooperating?

Latin America offers an important field for this investigation.

ECLAC proposes studying social cohesion through three pillars: gaps, institutions, and belonging, incorporating recognition, participation, conflict resolution, equality, and orientation toward the common good.

In 2026, ECLAC returned to this problem, describing a region still marked by high inequality, low social mobility, institutional weaknesses, and fragile social cohesion, while treating solidarity, coexistence, and dialogue as relevant components of social transformation.

Perhaps cooperation is not naïveté.

Perhaps it can also be an institutional variable.

Jiwasa does not mean the absence of norms

This is where Jiwasa enters.

We use Jiwasa as “We, the people”, the inclusive “we.”

And we add:

Jiwasa is feeling that we belong without needing to reduce our Being.

This does not mean a society without rules.

Nor does it mean expecting everyone to cooperate spontaneously.

The problem is different:

how can we produce common rules without requiring everyone to become the same Being?

I can belong without sharing your religion.

You can belong without sharing my interpretation of the world.

Secularism becomes fundamental precisely because belonging should not require identity.

Jiwasa does not eliminate the Self.

It allows different Selves to continue belonging to “We, the people.”

Every norm began as an interpretation

Here we encounter Vinicius Romanini.

Romanini brings semiosis and active inference together when investigating how organisms and artificial systems construct meaning and stabilize habits while navigating dynamic environments.

We can therefore look differently at the norm.

Before it became a rule, there was a situation.

Someone perceived a problem.

Interpreted it.

Produced meaning.

Proposed a response.

The response became institutionalized.

But the environment continued to change.

New technologies appeared.

New relationships emerged.

New conflicts appeared.

The Body-Territory changed.

Why should we imagine that a norm will remain perfectly adequate while that upon which it acts continues to transform?

This leads to a central formulation of this essay:

the norm must also learn.

From obedience to restitution

We can represent much of the institutional relationship as:

State → norm → Body-Territory → compliance.

But if the Body-Territory constitutes the State itself, this flow is incomplete.

We need the path back:

State → norm → Body-Territory → experience → difference → restitution → State.

Restituting the norm does not mean allowing each person to individually decide which laws they will obey.

It means allowing them to ask:

Why does this norm exist?

Whom does it seek to protect?

How does it apply to me?

How can I legitimately contest it?

What happened when this norm encountered my Body-Territory?

And finally:

how does this experience return to the institutions capable of revising the norm?

Democracy ceases to be merely the path through which a rule arrives.

It also includes the path through which its consequences return.

Personalissima AI can close the cycle

Here Personalissima AI acquires another function.

Today, understanding norms often requires time, education, technical language, and sometimes money to hire someone capable of interpreting them.

This creates asymmetry.

Personalissima AI could restitute the norm in the language of that Body-Territory.

Not to create a different legal truth for each person.

But to allow each person to understand the same rule under linguistic conditions that make interaction with it possible.

It could explain its origin.

Present rights and obligations.

Show legitimate pathways for contestation.

Record consequences.

We would therefore have:

State → Personalissima AI → Body-Territory

and also:

Body-Territory → Personalissima AI → State.

AI does not legislate.

It does not replace democracy.

It does not decide which norm is correct.

It reduces the informational distance between those who produce, interpret, and live the norm.

A norm created yesterday does not know tomorrow's Being

In Blog 7, we saw that an AI may know a great deal about our past and still not know who we are being now.

We can ask a similar question about institutions.

Can a norm produced from what we were anticipate what we may still become?

Some rules require stability.

Rights require continuity.

But stability cannot mean an inability to perceive a new difference.

A society changes.

The Body-Territory changes.

Even between one instant and the next, we can produce new perceptions and possibilities.

Institutional restitution must therefore preserve two things:

enough continuity to protect

and

enough openness to change.

Perhaps a living democracy is not one that has discovered perfect rules.

Perhaps it is one that preserves mechanisms through which its rules remain capable of encountering differences that did not yet exist when they were written.

When the State becomes “them”

There is therefore a particularly important question for our region:

at what point does the Body-Territory stop perceiving the State as “us” and begin to perceive it only as “them”?

Latin American research on social cohesion helps make this question empirically investigable.

ECLAC's regional overview examined 19 countries and 48 indicators related to gaps, institutions, and belonging.

Its 2026 regional overview keeps inequality, institutions, solidarity, coexistence, and dialogue at the center of the discussion.

Here our recurring provocation about the State becoming a “thing for the rich” also returns.

When understanding the State requires money, technical knowledge, privileged representation, or access to people capable of interpreting its structures, Body-Territories may formally belong to the same State while possessing profoundly different capacities to participate in it.

Restituting the norm is also an attempt to reduce this distance.

The State must become Jiwasa again

We therefore arrive at the eighth hypothesis of W41/2026.

If we do not know a State without Body-Territories, we can investigate the Body-Territory as its constitutive and indivisible unit.

Every norm that reaches us was born, at some point, from the activity of other Body-Territories.

But the democratic movement should not end when we receive that norm.

We live it.

It encounters our culture, language, metabolism, territory, and circumstances.

It produces consequences.

We perceive differences.

And those differences need legitimate pathways back to the collective.

The norm must also be restituted.

Jiwasa is not the absence of authority.

It is not unanimity.

It does not mean claiming that every human being is naturally good.

Jiwasa is belonging without reducing Being.

We are the State without ceasing to Be.

And because we may still Be in ways that no current norm can fully anticipate, every Body-Territory contains new possibilities for being the State.

Perhaps the democratic question can no longer remain only:

“Did you comply with the norm?”

It must also be capable of asking:

“What happened when this norm encountered you?”

Because when what we live can legitimately return to institutions, perhaps the State begins to recognize again what has always constituted it:

We, the people.

Jiwasa.

Commented References — Latin America, post-2021

TROMBEN, Varinia; CEA, Catalina; ACUÑA, Camilo. Metodología de medición de la cohesión social en América Latina y el Caribe: aprendizajes y desafíos futuros. ECLAC, 2022.
Proposes measuring social cohesion through gaps, institutions, and belonging, combining quantitative and qualitative indicators. It is particularly relevant because it frames the question of social coexistence without permanent dependence on external coercion or immediate material interest.

MALDONADO VALERA, Carlos; TROMBEN, Varinia; CEA, Catalina; SUÁREZ, José Ignacio. Panorama de la cohesión social en América Latina y el Caribe. ECLAC, 2021/2022.
Examines 19 countries and 48 indicators, incorporating recognition, participation, conflict resolution, equality, belonging, and orientation toward the common good. It offers an important Latin American empirical approach to the problem we describe here as the Jiwasa-State.

MALDONADO VALERA, Carlos; LEROY, Natacha; MAHALUF MEZA, Felipe; ESCOBEDO MUÑOZ, Florencia. Cohesión social y desarrollo social inclusivo en América Latina y el Caribe: segundo panorama regional. ECLAC, 2026.
Updates the regional diagnosis by relating high inequality, low social mobility, and weak social cohesion to institutional and governance challenges. It highlights solidarity, coexistence, and dialogue as important elements of inclusive and sustainable transformations.

MALDONADO VALERA, Carlos; LEROY, Natacha; MAHALUF MEZA, Felipe; ESCOBEDO MUÑOZ, Florencia. Cohesión social y desarrollo social inclusivo en América Latina y el Caribe: perfiles y prioridades nacionales. ECLAC, 2026.
Explores national differences and asks which priorities emerge regarding inequality, inclusion, democracy, and institutions. It helps prevent treating Latin America as homogeneous and reinforces the importance of territory in institutional analysis.

ROMANINI, Vinicius. Semiose, inteligência e inferência ativa. deSignis, no. 43, pp. 61–72, 2025.
Relates Peircean semiosis and active inference and discusses how organisms and artificial systems navigate dynamic environments, stabilizing habits and constructing meaning. In this essay, it provides a bridge for thinking of the norm as an institutionalized interpretation that continues to encounter changing environments.

GONZALEZ, Maria Eunice Quilici; BROENS, Mariana C.; QUILICI-GONZALEZ, José Artur; KOBAYASHI, Guiou. Hábitos e racionalidade: um estudo filosófico-interdisciplinar sobre autonomia na era dos Big Data. Trans/Form/Ação, 2023.
Contributes to the discussion of autonomy, habits, information, and the capacity to produce alternatives. For the BrainLatam Hypothesis, it helps us ask how institutional stability can coexist with autonomy and change.

BREGMAN, Rutger. Humankind: A Hopeful History.
This is not a Latin American reference and is not used as scientific confirmation of the BrainLatam Hypothesis. It enters as a contemporary provocation for questioning whether institutions may have overestimated the need for control while underestimating human capacities for cooperation.

W41/2026 — CEPID: From Personalissima AI to the Collective Future

BrainLatam Hypothesis: every norm that reaches a Body-Territory was born, at some point, from other Body-Territories. If we belong to and constitute the State, the democratic cycle does not end with obedience. The norm must return to those who live it, and what has been lived must be able to return to the State. The norm must also learn.