In 1948, the World Health Organisation set down a definition that almost every country adopted: health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease. This sentence has never been withdrawn. Yet our systems do the opposite: they define, measure and take charge of health mostly as the absence of disease. Sageocracy takes the other side seriously, and asks a simple question: what if the symptom were also a signal?
Health is not the absence of disease
In our systems, health is defined strangely: it is what is left when there is no disease. We worry about it when it deteriorates, we measure it through what is wrong, and we often intervene when it is almost too late. This approach has made considerable advances, which are not to be belittled. But it has three blind spots. It waits for the disease to be there, whereas much of what makes lives hard, fatigue, anxiety, insomnia, does not always come from a clearly identified disease: there is often a settled imbalance, which medication alone will not be enough to dispel. It cuts the body into organs: each specialist does their job, often excellently, but the person is rarely looked at as a whole, except by the family doctor. And it observes the body as if it worked in a vacuum, forgetting the daily life, the bonds and the environment that weigh on it. For Sageocracy, health is not a state to be recovered: it is a balance to be maintained, day after day. Nothing here replaces a diagnosis or a treatment of proven effectiveness, and nothing here invites anyone to stop one.
When the body speaks of the collective
From this shift comes another kind of listening. When several people in the same collective feel something similar, a fatigue that lasts, a diffuse unease, we do not only ask how to care for each person: we also ask what, in the way we function, produces this state. The symptom ceases to be merely an individual complaint and becomes information about the collective. This supposes two shifts: listening to what bodies express as a signal, and accepting that the well-being of all is everyone’s business, not only that of a specialist called in when something breaks down. To care, then, is no longer merely to repair: it is to make the organisation itself an act of care.
A signal, not a fault
The same holds for psychic suffering, of which our societies are going through a crisis of probably unprecedented scale. Depression, anxiety, burnout, a feeling of emptiness: these phenomena now touch every age and every milieu. A sageocratic perspective neither denies them nor reduces them to a biological problem to be corrected: it cares for them, with treatment when needed, and also hears in them a signal, information about the conditions in which a person and a collective live. This outlook replaces neither a diagnosis nor a treatment of proven effectiveness: psychiatry and psychotherapy remain necessary and precious. When suffering becomes massive, it is no longer only the psychology of individuals that is at stake, but the organisation that creates these conditions. How a society concretely cultivates this balance day to day, through food, rest and respect for the rhythms of the living, alongside medicine, the forthcoming book will unfold; this article only lays down the question.