Common Weal exists to build policies which improve the lives of everyone. That isn't a vague wish, it is a specific strategy. We have shown that it is possible to change things in ways that can build large, society-wide coalitions of shared support for policies which improve lives so long as we also have the courage to also challenge power and wealth. This is not about punishing anyone, it's about lifting everyone. There is very strong evidence that societies based on strong relationships, greater economic equality and high levels of trust achieve more. Much more.

But a society at war with itself creates mainly anger and division where a society that has ways of coming to agreement builds things. The idea that every good thing we do for one person has to be at the expense of someone else is false. Ask yourself if that’s really how you want to live, to assume that your quality of life is based on the suffering of your fellow citizens. Must the pensioner be at war with their grandchildren, the highlander with the borderer, the business leader with their workers, the schoolteacher with the nurse, the artist with the footballer? We've pitted all against all and it very clearly isn't working.

Of course there are conflicts of interest in society. If you want to move from a system which has encouraged conflict for decades or even centuries, it is inevitable that there will be powerful interests which have hoarded much more than their share of wealth, power, and influence. To put All Of Us First is to stop putting them first, and so they will lose the extent of their domination – as they should. But that does not mean they must be punished, that they too can't maintain a really good quality of life. We need not weep for the corporation, but bringing an era of Me First to an end has nothing to do with revenge, it is an honest effort to change the rules in favour of everyone in our society.

This is how we can escape the failure loop that Scotland is trapped in. This loop starts with a politics which puts the interests of the rich and powerful above the rest of us. It bows to wealthy people demanding low tax. It bows to corporations which resist regulation and expect you to clean up their mess through your taxes. It bows to big business asking to siphon more and more profit out of public services. This politics creates problems which get bigger and bigger (obesity, mental ill health, poverty, unaffordable housing, environmental degradation) and so cost more to fix. But at the same time the wealthy and powerful are dodging tax so the expanding cost of cleaning up the mess is being met by people who didn't make the mess (you) and it is being done through public services which are less inefficient because of the profit being extracted. Round and round this loop goes – poor social outcomes, large remediation bill, declining tax base, weakened public services. We were pushed into this failure loop by Me First politics and can only get out of it with All Of Us First Politics.

So how do we invert this down spiral? It needs us to do things in common. By working together and not against each other we change the direction of what we are doing. Acting in common democratises power, sharing it among many of us. People use power differently than institutions and decisions made by many people are generally better decisions. This is even more true when decisions are about things which are nearby you – a community together can renew and improve itself much better than a distant voice who does not know the community. We don’t make decisions for the common good because we don’t make decisions in common. Scotland would decide very differently if it did.

Working in common invigorates society. It gives people permission to step up and to step forward. When decisions are made apart from us, we sense our powerlessness. If we are not given power, we are not going to accept blame, and so everything becomes someone else’s problem. When we have power we become a partner in the running of our lives. It makes us all up our game. It gives us all a chance to fix what we want to fix. It means our country and our future become a mutual project; one we are all working for together. Powerless citizens moan, powerful citizens build powerful societies.

Cooperation makes it possible for us to behave differently, negotiation helps us avoid conflict, giving people power unlocks their creativity so is the parent of innovation and change. Mutual approaches work.Through a common approach we create many more businesses, many more people involved in the running of our country, much more sharing of resources so people can build and create more, have many fewer bullies.

This is togetherness, and Scotland has great potential to drive forward through the power of togetherness. This is at the heart of what Common Weal believes is philosophy which really puts All Of Us First.

Democracy should be about helping people to live the lives they hope to live. But forget what advertisers, corporations and the politicians tell you; the question of what people really want from their lives is well studied:

• We want sufficiency. We want the ability to live a good life because we have the resources we need to live that good life.

• We want security. We want the confidence that, whatever happens, we will still be able to live a good life this time next month and this time next year.

• We want peace. We want us and our community to be free from crime and violence and disruption and we want to be free of anxiety, stress and exhaustion.

• We want space. We want the places we live to make us feel better, and we particularly like green spaces we can relax in.

• We want respect. We want to be treated as valuable members of our community and not to be attacked for our identity.

• We want agency. We do not like being powerless or having no say or control.

• We want time. We want the time to enjoy the things we really enjoy and we want to spend less time on tasks that do not reward us.

• We want our health. We want to spend the maximum amount of time we can feeling free from illness and injury.

• We want freedom. We do not want to be overly-controlled or constrained in our lives.

• We want opportunity. We want a fighting chance to do better for ourselves, to improve our lives and try new things.

• We want purpose. We want to believe that we stand for something, that what we do has meaning, that we are moral people who make a positive contribution.

• We want joy. We want to feel pleasure and excitement and surprise and hope and love.

Sufficiency, security, respect, freedom, peace, purpose, space, time, health, opportunity and joy. These are what matters to people and a virtuous politics would be based on these hopes.

Economic equality: The evidence is really clear that where there is greater economic equality, almost everything in society gets better. It's not just poverty that recedes, so does ill health, crime, violence, environmental harm and mental illness. Trickle-down economics did not work and we need an alternative that drives greater income equality throughout the economy.

Real wages: A real wages is a wage that delivers a decent quality of life. Our problem isn't that we don't have enough economic redistribution through tax, it's that we have don't have enough economic redistribution through wages. Only a high-wage society can create a high-wellbeing society.

Universalism: Services funded by all and free to access by all transformed the world and continue to transform it today. These are not 'freebies', they are collective investments in collective wellbeing. Universalism is extremely efficient, highly effective and has done more than anything to create a better society in the post-war era.

Deep democracy: It's not about voting once every five years, it's about having the power to shape your society, your community, your life. Democracy will fail its citizens if it doesn't respond to what they need, and it is failing. From the local to the national, from running hospitals to developing policy, people must have power. All the time.

Decentralisation: Remote control is a terrible way to run the world. The people best able to shape our communities are the people who live in them. The people who know best how to run public services are the people delivering them. Bureaucrats and managers in offices miles from what is happening have made a mess of things. We need power to move outwards.

Prevention: Do no harm, because if you don't break it then you don't need to fix it. Everyone in politics knows this but no-one does it. We wait for problems to occur before we do anything. And we bow to the powerful and clean up their mess for them rather than stop them making the mess in the first place. From obesity to crime to climate change, the best way to solve a problem is to stop it becoming a problem in the first place.

Foundational economy: There are things that are so fundamental to our lives that they should be treated as something too important for the free market. Healthcare, policing and justice, roads and transport, education, care, food, housing – all of these things are a matter of life and death and so are known as the foundational economy. These are far too important to be left to the free market alone. We need public intervention for the public good.

Stable investment: Investment is to spend money today in the belief that it can make the future better. The good society is therefore literally based on investment, whether in the public or private sector or by citizens. But extraction is not investment – buying assets to exploit them and extract the profit is not investment but rent-seeking. We need to support real, patient, stable investment in every sector, but we must crack down on the unproductive 'rent-seeking' which is ripping us off.

Productivity over extraction: Productivity is about creating profit through adding value, but there are other ways to create profit. You can speculate on finance markets, you can buy up assets and rent them back to others, you can slash wages, you can look where others have added value and take it from them, you can become a middle man and take a cut of profits by getting in the way, you can buy companies and strip them of their assets. Every single one of these alternative ways of making profit do harm through extracting wealth from others rather than creating new wealth. We must always favour productivity over extraction.

Trust: Public bureaucracy seeks to keep both citizens and employees on a short leash. It is as if politicians believe that it is us must constantly convince them that we're not 'at it'. We are managed through performance indicators and targets, controlled through committees and petty rules, disempowered through centralisation and steep hierarchies. The ruling classes do not trust us, and so we don't trust them. But building anything great needs everyone to believe in each other. It should start from the top down.

Fair, efficient tax: A tax it is easy to avoid is a bad tax – which means an awful lot of the UK's taxes are bad taxes, shot through with loopholes designed by the wealthy to help them escape paying their share. For tax to be fair it is not enough that what is taxed is fair, or that the tax rates are fair, but that tax collection is fair too. No more evasion, no more avoidance, no more perks. Make everyone pay their share; no more than they are due, but never less.

National resilience: We got too used to the just-in-time, always-on global economy. We imagined there was no need to think about national resilience because we could always import our way out of our problems, couldn't we? Except that is no longer true and we need to give much more attention to what is the minimum we need to keep our society operating. And then we must develop a strategy for ensuring they can be kept in place, no matter what happens next.

Industrial policy: Our economic woes come at the end of 50 years of the democratic abandonment of the economy. We are trapped in an ideology that says the free market can do whatever it wants, whenever it wants and politicians should stay out of the way. On the contrary, the economy in a democratic society is there to serve citizens and it is clearly not achieving that for many. When governments intervene to change the nature of the economy it is called an industrial strategy. Scotland needs one urgently.

Shared assets: Persuading you to own things yourself is a great way to make you poorer. So is persuading you that you don't own things you actually do. From tool libraries and leasing to collective ownership of energy to public rental housing to shared facilities for business to co-investment, when we share assets they are more efficient and it saves us money.

Industrial democracy: We are mostly powerless at work and it has real consequences for how we are treated and how we are paid. The period when ordinary people did best out of the economy was the period when we had strong industrial democracy. After all, business owners would be nothing if they didn't have employees to do the work, so why don't the employees have a proper say in those businesses? In the most effective economies, they do, and it is known as industrial democracy.

Localism: Our society has been transformed by the car and is being transformed again by the internet. It can all make us forget that we live in a community and that community matters to us. If we do not support localism, the ability to live and work without becoming isolated and fragmented and lonely is harder and harder. We need to reverse this. For the environment, for social cohesion, for our mental health, we places to live where we can shop and meet and socialise and access public services without the isolation of the front seat of a car.

Deconsumerisation: It is assumed that more and more shopping is a good thing. It isn't; it strips us of our own money, does enormous damage to the environment, often relies on morally repugnant treatment of workers elsewhere in the world and distracts us from what makes us genuinely happy. What makes us genuinely happy is participating so we feel like we have a purpose in life, relaxing so we can release the stresses and strains of modern life, and socialising with our friends and family because that's what really makes us feel better. Happy people don't shop, so let's remind ourselves that there is an awful lot more to life than what you can fit in a carrier bag or a cardboard box.

Fair competition: Monopoly is the enemy of society. When economic power gets so big that it dictates terms to the rest of us, the free market no longer really exists. It's not just consumers who are harmed, it's competing businesses. That means Scottish businesses, because we have almost no global-scale corporations capable of fairly competing with the big players. We must make sure that they can get market access every bit as easily as the corporate bullies to help us grow our economy and protect our citizens.

Frontline first: Investment in public services is crucial to modern life, but that does not mean all public resource goes to the people delivering service – and neither does the power. Scotland has created a world of middle men, middle managers and committees of the bosses which hoard power and suck up resources. We need to shake the idea that more paperwork makes services better, we need to free frontline staff from the tyranny of middle managers through approaches like self management, we need services to be led by professionals in their field, not general purpose management graduates, and we should see every penny that doesn't make it to the front line as a penny poorly spent.

Design for life: One of the reasons that quality of life is deteriorating is that so much of our society is designed for profit or ease of management, not to enable better lives. Government's job is not to design city centres for the wealthy to extract the maximum amount of wealth from citizens nor to create public bureaucracy designed only to make bureaucrats' lives easier. Instead we should only ever design the public realm to make people's lives better – and that most certainly includes recognising that public ugliness does not make people feel better.

De-escalation: Whatever the problem, you can choose to make it worse or make it better. Very often we like to believe that making the problem worse is 'tough' and 'necessary', but it is always optional and often a sign of weakness. Crime is best tackled through rehabilitation, not longer sentences. Wars are avoided by stepping back from the brink and talking earlier rather than later. Pupils cannot be punished out of disruptive behaviour unless what is causing disruption to them is addressed. If we follow paths of negotiated deescalation, we have a much better chance of avoiding future crises.

Non-violence: Violence never makes anything better. We must learn to respond to adversity without trying to smash something or hurt someone. We need to train people from their early life to find one of the many ways to resolve conflict without violence. Violence pollutes everything it touches. There is no place for it in the good society.

Human security: There are always risks to our security, but they are seldom caused by bombs and so can't be solved with more bombs. Security is ensuring we are resilient in climate change, that our IT systems are robust in the face of cyber attacks, that our economy is not undermined by smuggling or people trafficking, and yes, that we could repel a foreign invasion if we needed to. Military defence is not keeping us safe from the real threats we face. Human security can.

Embedded innovation: Scotland is a place somewhat beset with the idea that 'we've always done it this way'. We have low levels of innovation in our economy and our public services and public bureaucracy are slow to grow. In Britain we behave as if innovation happens in a laboratory. That is rubbish. Real innovation comes from empowering a worker to say 'if we did it like this...'. We should embed a culture of innovation at every level in our society and not just from the top down.

Transparency: Politicians and public sector managers and governors exist on the basis of the permission we grant them through our democracy and the money we supply them through our taxes. They really do literally work for us and we should always have an absolute right to know what they are doing and why. Scotland is awash with denial, obstruction and dishonesty when it comes to getting prompt, accurate information out of public bureaucracies. We should assume 'glass walls' in government. It is our right to see, and the reason to deny us that right should be very specific indeed and not the spurious made up excuses we are fobbed off with just now.

Measuring what matters: We gather lots of data but it is very often the wrong data and we are rubbish at making that data work for us. If we want a better society we better work out what things make this society into that one – and we better start measuring them properly so we really know what's going on.

Long-termism: We live in the now, but there's always a then. Politics moves over very short time cycles but the real world doesn't. Every penny we save today by scrimping and saving and doing less than we should is a pound we'll have to spend tomorrow. We build cheap and pass the cost of replacement on to our children when we should have built properly. We behave like tomorrow will never come. A good society plans for the long term.

All that matters is everything you do: There is no 'one thing'. There is not 'top five things'. A better world is the result of everything we do or don't do. So is a much worse world. We cannot let ourselves off the hook. Everything we do matters, every policy matters, every decision. Let's behave like it.