The Transition
How to move from the present organisation to a sageocratic one: through a democratic choice, with its stages, its costs and its uncertainties.
What the transition is not
Every project of transformation raises an inevitable question: how do we move concretely from what exists to what is proposed? Sageocracy answers it precisely. It is neither a vague promise of gradual change, nor a centralized plan imposed from above, nor the passive expectation of a collapse.
The transition is not an abolition. Revolutions that begin by destroying everything almost always reproduce, under other names, the very same forms of domination they overturned. Where justice was at stake, forms of control appeared. Where liberation was at stake, new dependencies took hold.
Nor is the transition a sudden upheaval. It begins today, with each person who chooses to function according to the three principles. It only changes in nature at the moment when a people, through a vote by a large majority, chooses to leave the old system. This choice is prepared, decided democratically, and comes into force on a date set and announced in advance.
The tipping point is not an imposed transition, but an inversion of legitimacy.
Six points of clarification
- Not a revolution, nor a seizure of power
- Not a plan devised by experts and imposed from outside
- Not a decision taken without the people: only a vote by a large majority can open the door
- Not a promise without cost: the crossing will have its difficult years
- Not a centralized system that plans the economy
- Not a prison: no one is held back, everyone can leave and come back
Why it cannot be imposed
Sageocracy cannot be imposed. This impossibility is neither a limit nor a weakness. It flows from its very nature. An organization founded on the quality of perception, on the understanding of situations and on the search for coherence cannot be born of an external constraint. It can only emerge from an inner process, from a gradual change in the way reality is seen.
One does not join an organization like this one because one is obliged to. One enters it because something becomes obvious. Because what is perceived can no longer be ignored. Because the coherence observed calls for participation. An organization that claims to rest on perception and responsibility cannot begin by denying these principles. It would contradict itself from its very origin.
The means is not separate from the end. It is already its expression. This is why a simple majority is not enough for a change of this magnitude: syntony cannot be imposed at 52%.
What history confirms
The great transformations that have lasted, the abolition of slavery, women's right to vote, the protection of children, did not impose themselves by legislative force alone. They were preceded by a shift in collective perception that made the old state of things less and less tenable.
The law has often done no more than name what was already recognized. Sageocracy follows the same logic: to make perceptible what is coherent, so that recognition precedes, and calls for, formal change.
How it emerges
Great transformations almost never begin at the top. They are not born of a centralized decision, nor of a global plan applied everywhere in the same way. They take root elsewhere, in local spaces, through concrete experiences carried by people and groups who, at a given moment, begin to function differently.
These experiences do not see themselves at first as an overall movement. They appear at first as isolated initiatives, local adjustments, singular attempts. Yet they do not remain without effect. They accumulate. They produce results. They become references. Without central coordination, without a global strategy, they begin to answer one another, to reinforce one another, to weave an invisible but real fabric.
Local currencies that favor short supply chains. Organizations of several hundred people that function without hierarchy. Municipalities that involve citizens in their planning decisions. Schools that have replaced grades with narrated assessments. None of these experiences calls itself sageocratic. But all of them go in the same direction.
What Sageocracy names, the world is already doing.
The three phases of the path
The passage toward a sageocratic society will not follow a straight line. It will unfold in three phases, which may overlap but which answer to distinct logics. This is only one possible path, which those who live it will adjust.
People declare themselves Sageocrats on sageocracy.org. They begin to function from these principles in their decisions, their commitments, their relationships. This phase is almost invisible to institutions. It produces no electoral results. It does not make the headlines. From the outside, it looks like nothing. From the inside, it is what historians of transformation call the underground work of change: the period when collective representations shift before the structures move.
It begins when, in several countries, the number of registered Sageocrats reaches thresholds that make the phenomenon politically unavoidable. At this stage, elected officials declare themselves Sageocrats. Parties incorporate elements of the sageocratic vocabulary into their programs. Local authorities adopt mechanisms inspired by the principles. This phase carries a risk that must be named: when an idea enters the mainstream, it is often emptied of its most demanding substance. Sageocracy will then have to maintain the clarity of its principles in the face of inevitable simplifications.
Registrations decide nothing by themselves. When they become numerous enough, they can lead elected officials to initiate an official procedure. An assembly of citizens drawn by lot then examines the project, publicly, as Ireland did before its referendums. Then the people decide, by referendum, by a large majority, at least two thirds of the votes cast, with a minimum turnout written into the text put to the vote: a commitment made in advance, since the law in force often settles for a simple majority. A change of this magnitude also requires a revision of the Constitution. All of this takes place within the framework of the country's democratic institutions. On the day set, the government and Parliament hand back to the people the power to make the law, and their functions come to an end: a Sageocracy Council, each of whose members is approved by the people, proposes the laws, which the people adopt or reject. The Reliances are then deployed at the scale of the country and the filter of the living enters the legal framework.
Before the shift: the underground work
Before the shift becomes fully visible, a phase sets in, often long, sometimes uncomfortable, but profoundly necessary. During this period, the existing structures continue to function with their rules, their frameworks, their logics. They do not disappear. But in parallel, other ways of doing things appear, develop, gain in consistency.
The book is lucid about the limits of this phase: sageocratic experiments cannot really grow as long as the current framework prevents them. A school that learns differently remains on the margins. A cooperative that recognizes value differently is capped. A municipality that wants to truly decide together runs up against the rules in place. Sageocratic initiatives can emerge, they cannot change scale as long as the framework does not change.
And yet, it is precisely this underground work that prepares the shift. The spaces that already live differently do not seek to destroy the existing structures. They demonstrate. By their way of functioning, by the quality of the decisions they produce, by their capacity to move through tensions without falling apart, they make visible what is possible. Each coherent experience becomes a proof.
Three small countries that moved the world
Finland, in the 1970s, overhauled its education system. When the first PISA rankings were published, in the early 2000s, it found itself at the top, and its model became a global reference, even though its results have declined markedly since the 2010s.
Costa Rica abolished its army in 1948 and invested the freed budget in education, health, reforestation. Today, this country of five million inhabitants produces, except in years of severe drought, almost all of its electricity without fossil fuels.
Iceland, on gender parity, requires companies to prove equal pay, guarantees egalitarian parental leave, and supports the massive presence of women in politics. Since 2009, it has ranked first in the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Index.
Three countries, three fields. Each time, the same mechanism: no imposition, no crusade. A demonstration sustained over time, until it became a global reference.
The order in which sectors shift
After the entry into force, the transformation does not happen everywhere at once. Some sectors shift early because the conditions are already in place. Others take longer, as the alternatives become available. And as long as the transition currency exists, no one should lose out by shifting: a sector moves to recognized contribution when the commons cover most of what its members used to buy.
Housing, the first undertaking
Most of our homes were built without regard for the living. New housing is the first of the undertakings: it begins on the very first day and advances as fast as everyone's strength allows. Communities on a human scale, well-oriented houses, made of local materials, which need up to ten times less energy to heat. Everyone helps build the homes of others, freely, with craftspeople who make sure that what is built is sound.
Care
Care can shift early. Many caregivers already practice out of vocation as much as for the salary, and recognition through the Reliances, accompanied by guaranteed commons, will have to match this engagement. But it takes years to train a doctor. Most care is given where people live, surrounded by their loved ones; the hospital remains there for the cases that require it.
Education
Education follows naturally. Current education systems were designed to prepare for an industrial economy. The transition begins with learning spaces that value real transmission, contribution to the collective, the capacity to perceive bonds. And their effectiveness ends up displacing the official structures.
Agriculture
Agriculture can shift as soon as food security is in place. Farmers who regenerate their soils, preserve biodiversity, pass on their knowledge to younger people, see their contribution fully recognized by the Reliances. From the day after the set day, farms, with support, stop using synthetic pesticides and are paid to bring their soils back to life; synthetic fertilizers are phased out in stages, and the filter of the living gradually rules out the other practices that degrade.
Heavy industries
Energy, networks and transport shift later, as replacement technologies become available and as productive organizations transform. During this transformation, they continue to function on a wage-based model, paid in transition currency, so as not to interrupt vital functions.
Property becomes stewardship
The place one lives in remains the property of those who own it for twenty-five to thirty years after the set day, the span of a generation; the same goes for two places of stay at most, provided one really lives there part of the year. Beyond three places in all, it no longer makes sense. From the day of entry into force, no one pays rent any longer for the place they live in: the tenant becomes its steward, with a right to stay there that no one can take away as long as they take care of it. The person who used to let it keeps what they live in, and receives, for what they give up, the common compensation. Finally, accumulation comes to an end: the companies and funds that own housing by the hundreds are dissolved, and their homes go back to those who live in them; empty homes, beyond each person's three places, are entrusted to those who need them. The home one lives in is never taken away from the person who lives there, takes care of it and does not seriously harm their neighbors, those who live with them or the living.
The living, transversal
The principles of syntony and harmony with the living are not one sector among others. They run through all the preceding fields. They are the filter that determines, in each sector, what can be paid for in transition currency and recognized by the Reliances, and what cannot.
When a country shifts, what it really changes
On the ground, initiatives already exist everywhere. Farms that heal the soil. Schools that learn differently. Companies that truly share. They often produce better results than the system in place. And yet, they remain small.
Why? Because everything around them was designed for the other model. The roads, the factories, the laws, the public subsidies, everything, for decades, has supported the systems in place. A farm that takes care of the soil does not receive the same subsidies as an industrial operation. A school that learns differently has to fight against rules that were not conceived for it.
The problem is not the lack of solutions. It is the framework itself. The framework that decides, upstream, what can grow, and what will remain small.
When a country shifts democratically, it is not one law among others that changes. It is the entire framework. And when the framework changes, what was impossible becomes possible. What dominated loses its advantage. What demanded courage simply becomes the norm.
What the shift releases
The Reliances are deployed at the national scale. The initiatives blocked by the lock-in of institutions see their obstacles dissolve. The regulatory framework evolves to match the new legitimacy. Incentives realign. What was courageous and difficult in the old framework becomes the norm in the new one.
The speed of the transformation after the shift does not come from planning. It comes from the fact that thousands of projects, trained people, and already-tested models were only waiting for the framework that would make them viable.
The shift does not create the transformation. It releases it.
On the day of entry into force, three simultaneous acts
1. The essential commons are guaranteed. A share of the essential foods for a healthy life (first of all fruits, vegetables and other simple products of the earth), housing, care, education, basic clothing, the means to communicate, and the energy and water needed become accessible to all, without condition and free of charge. No one can fall below a subsistence threshold any longer.
2. The Reliances come into force. The recognition of contributions to the living, care, transmission, creation, presence, maintenance, becomes operational. The Reliances are not a currency: they are the trace of what a contribution has produced around it.
3. A transition currency is created. Digital only, distinct from the Reliances, on a separate system, it obeys three rules: the filter of the living (it can only pay for what respects the living, which is checked among those who sell, never in what each person buys), a currency that melts away (what one keeps of it decreases little by little, and it dies out within about fifty years), and non-convertibility (it cannot be exchanged for any foreign currency, nor can it be bought, with one single exception, fixed and the same for all: the visitors' welcome share). Each adult receives the same starting capital; children receive a reduced share, topped up when they come of age.
Trade with the world
The country does not close itself off, but it changes its relationship to the world. It seeks autonomy first for what is essential, and the filter of the living also applies to what comes from outside. What the country exports is paid for in foreign currency, paid into a common fund for external trade, which buys abroad what the country cannot yet produce. Visitors are welcomed as guests and obtain transition currency by contributing. They can also pay, in their own currency, a welcome contribution, the same for all, which opens to them a welcome share, modest and personal, that lapses when they leave: paying more does not give more. The model spreads through the coherence of its requirements, not through force: the more other countries shift, the more these exchanges will follow their own rules.
What becomes of the old system
The day a people chooses Sageocracy, it is not choosing a reform of the old system: it is choosing to leave it. What follows describes one possible way, not a fixed plan. Those who live through the crossing will set its terms, in syntony and in full awareness, and may find even fairer paths. Those who voted no remain full citizens. Reviews, set in advance (three years after the entry into force, then after five years, then every ten years), make it possible to correct the course. And the people will always be able, by the same path and with the same requirement, to go back on Sageocracy, but never on what is never put to a vote: the life, dignity, equality and freedoms of each person, the roof over their head, their everyday belongings and the essentials.
None of this applies today. These measures would require a decision by the people, a revision of the Constitution and withdrawal from several international commitments. Until then, everyone's contracts, loans, leases and pensions remain fully in force, and we invite no one to stop honoring them, nor to borrow, sell or stop saving by betting on this path: no one knows when a people will choose it.
Leaving the old monetary system
The country leaves its current currency and the agreements that bind it to that currency: for a eurozone country, the European Union and the euro, which the treaties allow it to leave two years after notification; elsewhere, a monetary union, a peg to a foreign currency or commitments to international creditors. It also leaves every military alliance, which would bind it in advance to the conflicts of others; it keeps its defense forces, and defends itself at once if it is attacked. The period is not there to go back on the choice, but to prepare the day of entry into force. Until the set day, everyday life goes on as the day before: people are paid, they buy, they receive care, and contracts are honored. A reference date, set on the day the official procedure is initiated, is published with its rules: it is the situation on that day that counts, so that no one has an interest in rushing. Outflows of money abroad are limited, and perhaps withdrawals too, as Cyprus and Greece did. These years will be difficult.
Holdings, the starting capital and the common compensation
Prices and net wages pass as they are into the new unit, one for one. Rents, for their part, come to an end for the places where one lives or works: each person becomes their steward. But accumulated holdings are not converted: that would copy the inequalities of the old world into the new one. Each adult receives the same starting capital, paid each month, over many years, at a published pace. The old currency, when it keeps a value abroad, gold and precious metals held as investments, and the foreign holdings of those who choose to live in the country join, in return for the common compensation, the common fund for external trade, where they serve everyone. For a modest part of the old wealth does pass over, by a single rule, the same for all: the common compensation. For what they cease to have (unconverted savings, together with what was handed over to the common fund, what they used to let, the land they entrust, shares in a company), each person receives every month, in transition currency, a sum calculated on a public reference value, up to a ceiling set by the people, the same for all.
Debt and the banks
Public debt is cancelled: a sovereign choice, openly assumed, which has its precedents in history and a cost, the loss of access to international credit. The cancellation also weighs on savers in other countries, often people of modest means: the country tells them so openly, and seeks with their governments what can soften this blow. Bank loans die out with the currency that had created them. Money lent between individuals or between companies dies out too, except for outstanding invoices, and what remained owed goes into the common compensation of the person who had lent it. Banks stop creating money, and those who worked in them put their know-how at the service of the transition currency and the common fund.
Pensions
Every retiree keeps the essentials guaranteed, stays in their home and receives the same starting capital as all adults, paid each month, as they used to receive their pension. What their pension mainly paid for no longer costs them anything: that is why pensions, tied to the old system, stop with it. One rule guides this passage: anyone whose pension was modest must lose nothing by it for what the essentials do not cover. The order of magnitude of the amounts will be published before the vote, with figures to back it up.
For everyone, the rule is the same: what one lives in remains one's own, what is guaranteed comes before what disappears, and only accumulation comes to an end.
Resistances, and what they signal
Every profound transformation meets resistances. This is neither an anomaly nor a failure. On the contrary, it shows that something real is being touched. But not all resistances are equal, and some of them are right.
The resistances of understanding
Many people do not oppose Sageocracy out of refusal. They do not know it yet, or they try to interpret it through the categories they already know, participatory democracy, communism, political ecology, collective spirituality. And because it does not fully correspond to any of these categories, it seems blurry to them. This resistance is not a rejection. It is a moment in the process of understanding.
The resistances of interest
Some people, some structures, some institutions draw a real advantage from the existing systems. A transformation that changes the framework is, for them, a concrete threat. This resistance rarely wears the face of what it is. It dresses itself in rational arguments. The difference is simple: a sincere objection seeks to improve. A resistance of interest seeks to prevent. The answer does not lie in confrontation, but in demonstration.
The resistances of fear
Every transformation passes through a crossing where the old reference points no longer quite work, while the new ones are not yet established. This in-between generates anxiety. This anxiety is not conservatism: it is a form of intelligence. It reminds us that a system, even an imperfect one, has a function. Responding to it means accompanying, making visible that the crossing is possible and saying honestly what it costs.
The objection that is right
Finally, we must reckon with another form of objection, the most precious one: the one that is right. Some objections will show that the book is mistaken, and it is to them that the greatest weight must be given. A resistance, when it is read well, is not an obstacle to be eliminated, but an indication of what still needs to be understood or adjusted. There is, lastly, the disagreement of someone who has understood well and does not want this path. It is neither a misunderstanding, nor an interest, nor a fear: it is a choice, as legitimate as that of those who take it.
The pitfalls to know
If resistances come from outside, the pitfalls come from within the movement. Six particular risks threaten a project like this one. They are all the more dangerous in that they can come from sincere people. To name them now is to give ourselves a chance to recognize them when they arrive.
The elitism of perception
The project speaks a great deal of syntony, of fine perception, of inner coherence. It might seem to suggest that some see better than others, and that it is they who should guide the rest. This would be a complete betrayal. Sageocracy does not call for an enlightened elite. It calls for the capacity to perceive, which is in every human being, to be cultivated and recognized everywhere. If one day a sageocratic organization begins to speak of itself as a spiritual, economic or political elite, it has left the path.
Paralyzing perfectionism
Wanting everything to be perfect from the very first day prevents one from beginning. Sageocracy is not built by waiting for ideal conditions. It is built in the real, with its imperfections, its setbacks, its improvisations. Better to begin clumsily than not to begin at all.
Community closure
The risk that a group of people who recognize themselves in this project end up functioning in a closed bubble, in an inner circle that congratulates itself on its lucidity and looks at others as if they had not yet understood. This is exactly the opposite of what is asked. A Sageocrat is not meant to stay among Sageocrats. They are meant to live, work, raise children, take care of their neighbors among everyone else, and to do so in a way that makes visible what they carry, without proclaiming it.
The instrumentalization of the vocabulary
When a word becomes popular, it is always taken up by organizations that do not share its substance. This will happen. Political parties will say "we are Sageocrats" without respecting its principles. Companies will put "Reliances" on their labels without transforming their practices. A regime may even call itself sageocratic in the name of a referendum won by nine votes out of ten, where no one could campaign for a no vote or read a free press. Such a vote is not the choice of a people: two thirds count only if everyone has been free to argue for yes as well as for no. The answer is the clarity of what is really sageocratic and what is not, demonstrated by the facts over time. The genuine is recognized by its effects, not by its labels.
Group pressure
When it is the community that recognizes, entrusts and welcomes, it can also exclude, judge, watch over people. A collective that uses recognition to make people bend has left the path. Every decision that affects a person's life must be open to challenge before people other than those who made it. Two rules protect everyone. First rule: no community may refuse anyone a home, recognition or a welcome because of their birth, the color of their skin, their religion, their language, their origin, their sex, their sexual orientation, their disability, their state of health or their opinions. Second rule, valid from today: as long as the people have not chosen Sageocracy, no one may use this name to demand your money, your property or your time from you, nor to take charge of your children's education. After that choice, only the common law will apply. And no one, neither before nor after, may demand from you an oath of allegiance in its name. What is offered to you in its name always remains free, and nothing is taken from you if you refuse it. If a group demands this of you, it has nothing to do with this project. Everyone remains protected by the laws of their country, and everyone may leave whenever they wish, taking back what they brought.
Turning the author into a figurehead
The author of the book chairs the association that makes this project known, but has no title and no authority in Sageocracy. This book is a proposal, not a word to be followed. If someone, one day, speaks in the name of a founder, they have left the path.
The Reliances carry within them their own transcendence
It is perhaps not their most visible characteristic. It is doubtless their most profound.
The Reliances are not designed to last indefinitely. They are designed to make their own existence unnecessary one day. At first, they are necessary: a society barely emerging from a system where everything was measured in money needs a visible device to recognize what until now was not recognized.
But as the generations that have known only the new framework succeed one another, as recognizing real contribution becomes a shared reflex rather than a technical device, the Reliances progressively lose their usefulness. They become a scaffolding whose building, from now on, stands on its own. One day, perhaps, they will disappear, without drama and without ceremony. Not because they will have been abolished, but because they will no longer be needed.
Sageocracy as a whole perhaps has this destiny: to become so natural that there will no longer be any need to name it.
This world is already here.
The transition begins with each person who chooses to function according to what they recognize as right, and to inscribe that choice within an organized collective endeavor. Each Sageocrat is a point of transition. The sum of these points forms the critical mass that can, one day, open the way to a democratic choice: it is the vote of the people, and it alone, that will make the shift legitimate.