Let us say it plainly: money sometimes gives a misleading picture of value. Raising a child, watching over an elderly parent, tending a soil so that it stays alive: none of this has a price, and yet it is what makes a society possible. Meanwhile, other activities display considerable prices while producing nothing essential. Sageocracy proposes another way of recognising value, which it calls the Reliances.
Money measures exchange, not value
This is not a matter of ill will: money has none, and it even works very well. The problem is that it claims to measure value while it measures only exchange. Unlike what holds a society together, speculation that produces nothing, or extraction that destroys in a few months what nature took millions of years to form, count as ‘productive’. Money calls value what can be counted, and non-value what cannot. It was a useful tool for centuries; it was simply never designed to recognise what links.
What ‘Reliance’ means
A Reliance is what links: a contribution that links a person to the collective, an attention that links a gesture to the living it nourishes. Where money separates what it measures from the rest, the Reliance keeps the link. It is neither a currency (one can neither accumulate it nor speculate with it), nor points (it ranks no one), nor a rating (it never reduces a life to a score). It is the recognition of a real contribution to the balance of the living. Recognition, not measure: one does not quantify what has been brought, one recognises it.
A filter: the living
At the heart of the Reliances, a simple rule changes everything: only what really contributes to the balance of the living can generate one. Not by the decree of an authority, but because a process of recognition cannot recognise what does not exist. An activity that harms health, soils or the living does not produce a Reliance, not because a regulation forbids it, but because it links nothing. How this works, how the essential becomes accessible to all without being billed, and how this criterion evolves with knowledge, the forthcoming book will unfold; this article only lays down the idea.