The Reliances
Another way of recognizing what each person brings to the world — including what cannot be sold.
What current systems cannot see
What do we do with the things that cannot be sold?
The hours a nurse spends with someone nearing the end of life. A parent's patience. The knowledge a researcher gives away. The hands of a farmer tending the soil. The attention of a neighbor who calms a conflict.
All of these things matter. Yet today, nothing really knows how to count them.
Our economy can measure only one thing: what sells. Everything else — the care given to a loved one, the knowledge passed on, the bonds that keep a community standing, the nature we protect — slips through. This does not mean these things do not exist. It means the system itself cannot see them.
This is not a flaw that could be fixed by changing two or three laws. It is a limit of the system itself. The Reliances do not try to repair it. They propose something else: another way of recognizing what truly counts.
What the Reliances are not
- A replacement currency
- Points to be accumulated
- A measure of hours worked
- A reward in exchange for an act
- A tool for speculating or hoarding
What they are
- A living trace of what each person brings
- A key that opens responsibilities and possibilities
- A way of making visible what is right — not a tool of control
- One part of a new economic architecture — alongside the commons and the transition currency
Qualitative recognition
In any group, some actions bring clarity. They help untangle tensions. They move things forward. Others, sometimes unintentionally, create confusion or throw the whole group off balance. Everyone senses it — yet no current system knows how to take it into account. The Reliances do exactly that: they make visible what is felt.
What they recognize is not the person in the abstract. Nor is it their intention. It is what they actually brought, at a precise moment, in a precise situation. It is not about saying that one person is worth more than another. It is about saying: "At that moment, in that context, what was brought was right — and it helped the group." Recognizing without fixing in place. Valuing without ranking.
Local recognition
Groups — members of the collective, those directly concerned, elders — observe the contribution in its context. It is not a grade. It is a shared way of seeing. A single question: did this action clarify, soothe, strengthen the group?
Peer recognition
Those who directly received the effect of a contribution recognize it. A caregiver, by those they cared for. A builder, by those who live in what they built. A teacher, by what their students carry over time — not only by what they know in the moment.
Digital validation
A shared platform will allow anyone to declare a contribution and to receive feedback on what it truly produced. It will be developed as the movement grows. Its technology will be energy-frugal, with no central authority, and no way to cheat.
The Reliances are not a replacement currency. What they do is reveal.
What the Reliances open — and what they guarantee
The Reliances are not a salary. They are not exchanged for money. They open doors — to rare training, shared tools, spaces in which to create, collective responsibilities. What they grant is not what is essential. What is essential is guaranteed to all, unconditionally. They grant something else: what enriches, broadens and deepens life.
When a person's contributions have been recognized as right and lasting in a given field, responsibilities in that field are entrusted to them more naturally. Not by arbitrary decision, but because they have already proven, by doing, that they were capable of it. Legitimacy is built over time, through deeds — not through a title.
This principle holds at every scale — from the small local group to the international organization. It makes it possible to build a governance in which responsibilities are carried by those who have already shown, concretely, that they know how to bear them.
Unconditional universal access
In a sageocratic society, certain resources are guaranteed to all, unconditionally. Quality food, housing, care, education, basic clothing, water, energy, internet access. They are organized as commons: no one has to buy them, no one can be deprived of them. The people who produce the essentials — farmers, caregivers, teachers, builders — see their work fully recognized through Reliances. Everything else — what enriches life without being essential — runs through the Reliances. This is the economic foundation of Sageocracy.
Alongside the commons and the Reliances, a transition currency — declining, subject to the filter of the living, and not convertible with outside currencies — accompanies the crossing of the first decades. Its architecture is detailed on the The Transition page.
A potter goes through a period of illness and can no longer contribute for several months. Their access to food, care and living space remains intact. When they recover, they pick up again at their own pace. The collective did not have to manage their absence. It simply welcomed it.
The filter of the living
At the heart of the Reliances lies a simple rule. It is not a list of prohibitions. It is a direct consequence of their nature: only what truly contributes to the balance of the living can produce them. No authority imposes it. It is built into the very working of the system.
Food
Food that destroys health — products saturated with pesticides, industrial farming where animals suffer, processing that damages the soil — cannot produce Reliances. Not because a law forbids it. Because the contribution to the living simply is not there.
Construction
A building made of toxic materials, which cannot be recycled, which leave irreparable damage behind them — this generates no Reliances. Its whole life cycle is considered: where the materials come from, their real impact, their capacity to be reused, repaired or passed on without leaving an invisible debt for the living.
Transport
Every stage of a vehicle's life counts: the origin of the materials, its operation, its end of life. Every impact must be thought through from the design stage, and its regeneration anticipated — so that no trace weighs longer than it should. This requirement evolves with technical progress.
Elimination by coherence
The trafficking of substances that destroy health. Finance that does nothing but speculate. Corruption in all its forms. None of these systems generates Reliances. They are not banned by decree. They simply fade away — not by constraint, but because nothing in them contributes to what sustains life.
Energy
Energy-production systems that do not account for their full impact — extraction, emissions, waste — do not generate Reliances. Energy itself is not the problem. It is a system's ability to take responsibility for every stage, from start to finish, without leaving the bill to nature or to future generations.
Digital technology
Digital services that live off captured attention, data taken without genuine consent, or dependencies that harm mental health and human bonds — generate no Reliances. Digital technology is not excluded. But its impact on people's lives counts as much as the material footprint of the servers that run it.
Stewards rather than owners
This logic profoundly changes our relationship to places and lands. Today, to inhabit a place, to decide about it, to enjoy it, you have to own it. And ownership has nothing to do with how that place is inhabited, cared for, or connected to what surrounds it.
In a sageocratic organization, this changes gradually. Personal ownership of land and living places gives way to stewardship. A place is not owned: it is entrusted, for a time, to those who care for it. And caring for a place — keeping the soil alive, maintaining a home, preserving the surrounding nature — is a contribution recognized by the Reliances.
This principle does not apply overnight. It takes shape little by little, as sageocratic collectives put the necessary tools in place. No one is dispossessed: today's owners become the first stewards of the places they inhabit — and it is they who choose, when the time comes, to whom they pass on the stewardship. During the transition, the old forms of ownership coexist with the first experiences of stewardship. But the direction is clear: we move from a system where one owns to a system where one cares.
A handover, not an inheritance
A farmer has worked a forty-hectare piece of land for twenty years. Their community recognizes them as a steward — because the land is alive, because biodiversity is preserved there, because they already pass on their knowledge to young farmers. Their Reliances reflect this long-term commitment. When they sense that their contribution to this place is coming to an end, they take part themselves in choosing the person to whom it will next be entrusted. Not an inheritance. A handover.
What the Reliances make visible
The Reliances make visible what today's economy cannot see. They concern all the contributions that help a group stay balanced and alive — whatever their form, their visibility, or their value on a market. The domains below are not a closed list. Any contribution that makes a collective more coherent, more alive, more aligned with the three principles of Sageocracy can be recognized.
Care
Supporting vulnerable people. Being present. Tending the bonds that keep a group human. It is the most essential contribution — and the one current economic systems ignore the most.
Transmission
Education, mentoring, the sharing of knowledge and know-how. Everything that passes from one generation to the next — so that what has been learned, understood and built does not fade away with those who carried it.
The living
Regenerative agriculture, the preservation and restoration of ecosystems, any action that sustains life on earth — rather than consuming it.
Creation
Art, literature, music, design, architecture — when they nourish the collective experience, not just the fortune of the one who signs them.
Organization
Animating a collective, easing a conflict, coordinating. That invisible contribution which allows all the others to exist.
Research
Open knowledge, shared innovation, the exploration of unanswered questions. The contribution whose effects show over decades, not over quarters.
Governance
Taking part in collective decisions. Building the rules that allow a group to govern itself. Exercising responsibilities in the open. What allows a collective to settle its tensions internally, without having to call on an outside authority.
Memory
Preserving and passing on cultural heritage, ancient know-how, the stories that give a community its grounding and its identity. What keeps the thread from breaking with each generation.
The safeguards
To prevent abuses, several principles are built into the way the Reliances work. First, the Reliances do not accumulate. They accompany a contribution as long as it is alive. They fade naturally when it stops. This is not a constraint. It is the logical consequence of what they are — traces of living contribution, not titles acquired forever.
Second, they are neither transferred nor converted into money. They are not sold, not traded, not hoarded as a separate form of wealth. This rule protects them, by construction, from any logic of speculation.
Everything rests on genuine transparency. The criteria for recognition, the validation processes, the possible uses — all are known to everyone. The opacity of incomes and the secrecy of financial flows do not vanish by decree. They simply become impossible in a system where what is not visible cannot circulate.
The collective conditions of flow
The researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi studied, over several decades and in more than fifty countries, the state of flow. It is the state in which a human being reaches the highest level of engagement and meaning. This state does not arise when one receives money. Nor when one beats a competitor. It arises when one is fully engaged in an activity that matches one's abilities — and when that contribution is recognized for what it is.
The Reliances are, by their very construction, the economic system that creates the conditions for this state. Not for a few, in exceptional circumstances. For everyone, in the ordinary course of daily life.
A complete system in the reference work
The Reliances are developed in depth in the manuscript completed in May 2026 — their full architecture, their mechanisms of recognition, their effects on governance and the economy, and the concrete steps for putting them in place. Their real functioning will unfold as the movement reaches the necessary thresholds.
Discover the manuscript →Life is no longer something to be earned.
By registering, you help build the human foundation on which the Reliances will be able to rest. What you bring, whatever its form, may one day be recognized for what it truly is.
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