Faced with the troubles of our societies, the concentration of wealth, the exhaustion of the living world, the spreading distrust, one reflex takes hold: to look for a culprit. A bad leader, a failed policy, an unfortunate decision. But something rings false in that explanation. Leaders change, eras pass, and the same problems return under other forms. As if, behind the persons, something kept producing the same results. What if what goes wrong were not an accident?
A system does what it was made to do
A system produces the results it was designed for. If those results seem absurd to us, it is not necessarily that it works badly: perhaps it works very well, but to produce something other than what we expect from it. Take money. It seems as natural as the air, and yet it is a construction, set in such a way that it demands endless growth. This is not a matter of ideology, but of mechanics. The idea is unsettling, because it shifts the gaze: as long as we look for people to blame, we hope that by replacing them, all will improve.
It is not human nature
Then comes the objection heard everywhere: ‘it is human nature, people are like that, every society ends up dominating and accumulating.’ It is perhaps the sentence that most prevents us from believing in change, for if it is human nature, there is nothing to be done. Except that it is not true. For tens of thousands of years, complex human societies, sometimes real cities, existed without kings, without elites, without a bureaucracy commanding from above. If that existed, then what we take for eternal is only one arrangement among others.
Why it will not reform itself
One troubling question remains: if so many people see the limits of the system, why does nothing really change? Because one does not rewrite the rules of the game while the game is on. From inside, one can play better, win for a good cause, redistribute one’s gains; one cannot change the rules. The system even goes so far as to absorb its own critique: a committee, a label, a report, and the critique is acknowledged without the core moving. That is why it will not reform itself. Sageocracy does not seek to play this game better: it proposes to change its plane. The forthcoming book will show how; this article merely names the problem.