An organizing principle is a core assumption from which everything else by proximity can derive a classification or a value. It is like a central reference point

Reference Point

Reference Point is the first album by Acoustic Alchemy released in 1990 for jazz label GRP and their fourth album overall.Containing some of the band's more popular tracks, such as the title track "Reference Point", "Same Road, Same Reason" and "Cuban Heels", the nine-track album is also the only...

 that allows all other objects to be located. Having an organizing principle might help one simplify and get a handle on a particularly complicated domain. On the other hand, it might create a deceptive prism that colors one's judgment.

Examples

• In a The Brookings Institution article, James Steinberg
  James Steinberg
  James Braidy "Jim" Steinberg is an American academic and political advisor, and former Deputy Secretary of State. He is currently Dean and Professor of Social Science, International Affairs, and Law at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.-Early career:He...
  
   describes how Counter terrorism has become the organizing principle of U.S. national security.
• The idea of the solar system
  Solar System
  The Solar System consists of the Sun and the astronomical objects gravitationally bound in orbit around it, all of which formed from the collapse of a giant molecular cloud approximately 4.6 billion years ago. The vast majority of the system's mass is in the Sun...
  
   is based on the organizing principle that the sun is located at a central point, and all planets rotate around it.
• Most modern cities are based on the organizing principle of the Grid plan
  Grid plan
  The grid plan, grid street plan or gridiron plan is a type of city plan in which streets run at right angles to each other, forming a grid...
  
   in order to better manage transportation and addressing
  Address (geography)
  An address is a collection of information, presented in a mostly fixed format, used for describing the location of a building, apartment, or other structure or a plot of land, generally using political boundaries and street names as references, along with other identifiers such as house or...
  
  .
• Most religions (as opposed to cults
  Cults
  Cults is a suburb on the western edge of Aberdeen, Scotland. It lies on the banks of the River Dee and marks the eastern boundary of Royal Deeside.Cults, known for its historic granite housing, sits approximately six miles from the coast of the North Sea...
  
  ) can be described by social scientists as built around an organizing principle (for example, the divinity of Christ) that allow for the sustainable or improvable recursion
  Recursion
  Recursion is the process of repeating items in a self-similar way. For instance, when the surfaces of two mirrors are exactly parallel with each other the nested images that occur are a form of infinite recursion. The term has a variety of meanings specific to a variety of disciplines ranging from...
  
  of a unique population.