Every society rests on a convention: that of what counts. What is recognized is valued — time, resources and attention are devoted to it. What is not recognized disappears from trade-offs, budgets, collective decisions. Not because it does not exist, but because the tools at our disposal do not know how to see it.
Our societies know how to count economic output, income, market capitalization, GDP. They do not know — or know very poorly — how to take account of social cohesion, the health of ecosystems, the transmission of knowledge, the care given to vulnerable people, the contribution of artists to the vitality of a community, the invisible labor of those who maintain the fabric of the living without the markets rewarding it.
This is not an oversight one could correct by changing two or three laws. It is a limit of the system itself: our economy can evaluate only one thing, what is sold. Everything else escapes it. Sageocracy does not seek to perfect this tool of measurement — it proposes something else, of another nature: the Reliances.
The Reliances are not a way of measuring value. That would reproduce the problem under another name. They are a way of recognizing what each person brings to the world — including what is not sold. To recognize is not to measure: it is to render visible, to bring into existence in the collective gaze what would otherwise remain in the shadows.
What the Reliances recognize
A Reliance is not a unit of account, nor a currency in the transactional sense of the term. It is the living trace of a contribution to the common good — the mark, set down in the memory of a collective, that at a given moment, in a given situation, what was brought was right and helped the whole.
What recognition looks at is not the person in the absolute, nor even their intention. It is what they brought concretely. And to grasp it, three questions recur — which are not calculated, but appreciated together.
The first is temporal reach: does the contribution produce passing effects, or does it create favorable conditions that last? A decision that saves resources today while degrading an ecosystem for a century does not go in the right direction. An action that is costly in the short term, but strengthens the resilience of a community for the decades to come, does.
The second is systemic reach: does the contribution affect one person, a small group, or wider balances — social, ecological, cultural? A daily gesture of care toward an isolated elderly person counts at a local scale, but a real one. A way of doing things that durably reduces imbalances counts at a vaster scale. Neither erases the other.
The third, the most demanding, is coherence with the living: does the contribution nourish or impoverish the fabric of the living, human and non-human? It is the hardest to discern, and the most fundamental. It is so central that it acts as a filter: what destroys the living cannot, by its very nature, produce Reliances — not because a rule forbids it, but because the contribution to the living is not there.
What the Reliances are not
A few predictable misunderstandings deserve to be dispelled from the outset.
The Reliances are not a replacement currency. They are not exchanged for money, are not bought, are not hoarded. They operate in another register — that of recognition, not of market exchange.
They are not points one accumulates, nor a measure of hours worked, nor a reward distributed in exchange for an act. To reduce a contribution to a score or a tally would be precisely to fall back into the logic of measurement they seek to move beyond.
They are not a cryptocurrency. They do not rest on a logic of speculative assets and do not aim to create a new class of tradable wealth. The analogy is superficial and misleading: it projects onto the Reliances the spirit of accumulation that is precisely what they move away from.
Finally, they are not a social scoring system. They do not serve to monitor behaviors, to make access to rights conditional on a compliance score, or to rank people according to a displayed virtue. They render visible what is right; they are not a tool of control. Any drift in that direction would betray the very principle that founds them.
Precedents that illuminate the direction
The idea of recognizing differently what counts is not new. Several experiments, recent or ongoing, illuminate the direction in which the Reliances are situated.
The well-being indicators developed by countries such as Bhutan, New Zealand or Scotland have shown that it is possible to steer a public policy by integrating what GDP ignores: mental health, social bonds, the state of ecosystems, a sense of the future. These experiments are imperfect, but they demonstrate that it is politically possible to widen the gaze.
Local and complementary currencies — from the SOL-Violette in Lyon to the Brixton Pound in London — have shown that it is possible to create instruments that steer behaviors toward cohesion and sustainability, without replacing the national currency. The Reliances are not a currency; but these experiments prove that a society can bring into existence forms of value other than market price alone.
Time-sharing systems and time banks, finally, have shown that care, mutual aid and the transmission of knowledge can be recognized and honored within non-market logics, without losing anything of their character as a gift.
The Reliances are part of this lineage — systematizing it, and explicitly linking it to an architecture of governance.
How the Reliances open up responsibilities
In the architecture of Sageocracy, the Reliances are not a mere tool of symbolic recognition. They are a key. When a person’s contributions have been recognized as right and lasting in a domain, responsibilities in that domain are more naturally entrusted to them — not by arbitrary decision, but because they have already shown, by doing, that they were capable of it. Legitimacy is built this way over time, through acts, and not through a title.
This dimension is political, and it is decisive. To recognize is already to choose what we look at together. Systems of evaluation are never neutral: GDP is not an objective description of economic reality, it is a choice about what deserves to be counted — a choice with immense consequences, which orients public decisions, legitimizes certain activities and renders others invisible.
The Reliances propose a different choice. They say that care counts. That transmission counts. That ecological resilience counts. That fidelity to the fabric of the living counts. And that these things can be made visible — imperfectly, provisionally, in a work of continuous refinement — without waiting for them to find a market translation. They do not only open up responsibilities: they also open up access to possibilities — rare forms of training, shared tools, spaces in which to create. What they give is never the essential, for the essential is guaranteed to all, unconditionally; they give what widens and deepens life.
This is perhaps the most tranquil, and the most radical, proposal of Sageocracy: not to change those who govern, but to change what those who govern look at when they decide.
A recognition under construction
The Reliances, as the book describes them, are an architecture of principle, not a fixed system. Their implementation — the way recognition is organized concretely, the spaces of deliberation, the bodies that host it — is an open undertaking. It calls for plural contributions: care practitioners, ecologists, economists, philosophers, and first of all the communities directly concerned.
A shared platform will, in time, allow everyone to give an account of a contribution and to receive its echo — what it has truly produced. It will develop as the movement grows: sober in energy, without central authority, and designed so that it cannot be falsified.
This is deliberate. Sageocracy does not claim to hold all the answers. It claims to pose the right questions, and to create the conditions for the answers to emerge collectively — in a process that is itself syntonic: attentive to signals, continuously adjustable, anchored in the real.
« What is not recognized disappears from decisions. The Reliances are a way of bringing into existence what truly counts. »
The book Sageocracy — Toward a society founded on consciousness, syntony and the living develops the complete architecture of the Reliances, their foundations and their concrete applications in different sectors. It is currently under editorial submission and will be published soon.