Chapter 7
Going beyond the philosophical vision of the Enlightenment

In Chapter 1, we indicated the two answers that Marx proposed to the fundamental question: Why does progress not benefit everyone?
Then in chapters 2 and 3, we explained the sociological bases which Marx did not have at the time he formulated these answers.
Then, we illustrated their consequences at the level of the decision-making process, the underlying mental representations of the world, and finally the historical course which followed, to finally specify the current context in which Marx's great initial question once again becomes burning.
We will now end the first part of this book by returning to the initial question, to finally provide a new answer.

Updating and generalizing Marx's problem

Let's start by situating the question 'Why doesn't progress benefit everyone' within the general framework of philosophy.To do this, let's start with the very general question: What is philosophy?
Without claiming to exhaust the subject, we offer two answers: First, philosophy is a tool for coping with the stress of the disappearance of those you love, and of your own future death. Then, it is a tool to get out of mutually destructive attitudes.
However, we defined in Chapter 2 what mutually destructive attitudes are, namely generalized nepotism which generally takes the form of confrontations of the type 'us against them'.

From then on, we can understand the bias of Marx's reasoning. Marx starts from the absolutely legitimate question of why doesn’t progress coming from the productivity explosion benefit everyone? But he answers: because of the class struggle, and deduces that the strong solution is to eliminate the capitalist class. In doing so, he reduced widespread nepotism to its expression in a given historical context, namely that of capitalism.  Consequently, when we apply our solution, we change the historical context since we move to communism, and generalized nepotism reappears in another form. This is illustrated by the experience of communism in the USSR, where it reappeared just as violently in the form of the struggle between the party and the others.
To avoid making Marx's error, we conclude that to his question of why progress resulting from the explosion of productivity does not benefit everyone, the answer must be more independent of the context, therefore take the form of: because of widespread nepotism.
Hence the reformulation of Marx's problem in the form: what would be a social organization that effectively limits generalized nepotism?

We can therefore finally, in the light of the new knowledge acquired since then, and the specificities of our time, update the initial question posed by Marx, in the form:
What would be a satisfactory social organization, which takes into account the three main constraints:
1. the two key elements of human nature are the search for social advancement and cognitive dissonance,
2. their natural effects are the proliferation of supervision and irrationality of decisions in organizations,
3. Earth has become the limiting factor, whereas previously it was our technology.

Let us now re-examine the various solutions proposed to date, in light of the reformulation that we have just carried out, and the various contributions at the beginning of this book.

The communist solution

This is the solution proposed by Marx in the Communist Party Manifesto, namely the collectivization of the production tool. Marx notes that the industrial revolution changes the nature of the ownership of the tool of production from individual to capital, which produces a disastrous social effect. So he quite logically proposes to eliminate capital by collectivizing the means of production.

We see three major objections to this solution:

The first, we have just expressed it at the moment when we have updated and generalized the initial problem: the class struggle is only the expression of generalized nepotism in the capitalist context. If we change the context, for example by collectivizing the means of production, without taking more precautions, then generalized nepotism, and the permanent stress that it induces on individuals, reappears in a new form. This is what is happening in the USSR and China with periodic purges.

The second objection is that by calling for the overthrow of the bourgeois class by the proletariat, Marx is in fact responding to 'Who' exercises power instead of answering 'How' power is exercised. This is reflected in a high level of improvisation noted by witnesses just after the October 1917 revolution.

Our third objection is that in the Manifest, Marx speaks of the working class as a well-defined and above all stable entity over time. However, the chapter on generalized nepotism showed us that, with a few rare exceptions, the dream of a worker is not so much to overthrow the bourgeoisie as to access it, or to allow his children to access it.

The social democratic solution

Subsequently, in Capital, Marx proposes another solution. It is nothing more and nothing less than the modern vision of liberalism, namely the regulation of capitalism by the state by means of law, that is, social democracy.

We will raise four objections to this.

The objection of too weak regulation of inequalities

The first objection is that the level of regulation necessary to maintain inequalities at a socially acceptable level over the long term is never achieved in practice. The cause is cognitive dissonance, which leads, as Marx himself remarks at the end of the Capital, to translate great indignation into small actions. More rigorous validation of this argument can be found in the studies carried out by Thomas Piketty and a few other economists concerning the evolution of inequalities in various countries, over as long a period as the available documents allow. These results are presented in Capital in the 21st century :
“When the rate of return on capital significantly exceeds the rate of growth - and we will see that this has almost always been the case in history, at least until the 19th century, and that this has a good chance of becoming the norm in the 21st century - ... it is almost inevitable that inherited wealth will largely dominate wealth built up over a lifetime of work, and that the concentration of capital will reach extremely high levels, and potentially incompatible with meritocratic and the principles of social justice which are the foundation of our modern democratic societies. »

Another element showing the power of cognitive dissonance which leads to the formatting of economic thinking, even among elites, and therefore their inability to fight effectively against inequalities. At the beginning of the 21st century, their reactions during interviews show that many journalists have understood that the trickle-down effect is a capitalist ideology contradicted by the facts. But as soon as we approach the shocking aspect of the extreme wealth of billionaires, they differentiate between business founders who “create thousands of jobs” and heirs to great fortunes. This shows a bias which consists of looking at the successful entrepreneur of the new economy (generally digital) as someone who has created jobs, and could therefore, as such, claim extraordinary wealth. However, observation of the real functioning of capitalist enterprises shows that it is simply one or the survivor of the phase of concentration which inevitably takes place after the phase of the pioneers. This second phase causes the vast majority of the initial players to disappear purely and simply, or by absorption. In other words, what created jobs was the emergence of a new market. If this particular business owner had not existed, or had been less successful, there would not be fewer jobs tied to this new market, but those jobs would simply be distributed to other businesses.
Once again, we have forgotten that what creates wealth is progress, and that progress is above all the result of the modern scientific method applied correctly. There may be men (politicians) who hinder this progress, but no providential man (entrepreneur) who creates it through his simple personal talent. Exceptional personal talent can only exist at the level of science with Newton and mechanics or Einstein and general relativity. We can also recognize the courage of entrepreneurs who are pioneers of a new market, provided we view them as explorers. Would we consider it normal for an explorer to become a billionaire, and above all would we consider an explorer great because he became a billionaire?

The ecological objection

The second objection to the regulation of capitalism by law within the framework of social democracy is, as history over the last 50 years shows, its inability to manage ecological constraints. However, we saw at the beginning of this chapter, when we updated Marx's problem, that satisfying the ecological constraint is now essential to put progress at the service of all.
A double reason explains the ineffectiveness of the regulation by law of the disastrous ecological effects of the capitalist system. On the one hand, ecological effects only exist in the long term and are diffuse, while the effects of economic regulation are more local and visible in the short term, therefore political arbitrations, as opposed to discourse, are mainly in favoring the economic to the detriment of the ecological.
But even assuming that the will, and especially the political courage, could exist at a certain moment, then the problem would not be resolved. Indeed, if we place ourselves within the framework of a capitalist market economy, then the objective of the company is profit, therefore the laws are constraints - at best fair if they apply to everyone - to the extent that they tend to increase production costs. So companies, assuming that they do not transgress them, will still seek to circumvent them. However, the complexity inherent to technological progress means that, at a certain stage, the laws no longer manage to correctly deal with all possible cases, so circumventing without even transgressing becomes possible.
If we want to have a responsible approach from an ecological point of view, it therefore becomes essential to change our approach. Indeed, we can very well evaluate a given company from an ecological point of view: we just need to observe what it does. This is what we will propose in the second part of this book. On the other hand, if we want to be governed by the law, then we must consider everything it could do, and that is impossible in terms of complexity.
In summary, it is progress itself, and its corollary of increasing complexity, which means that dealing with ecological constraints through law is not technically feasible.

The debate sterilization objection

The third problem with the regulation of capitalism by law in social democracy, which is probably the least, is that it concentrates in practice the political debate around more or less regulation.
The right says that its position is more effective, and eliminates the problems of inequality with this assertion, however contradicted by all observations, that if there is a general increase in wealth, this ends up benefiting everyone via an alleged 'trickle down effect'. The left says that its position is morally more just, and eliminates the problem of efficiency by systematically associating it with a problem of lack of resources. Then, the great illusion is to pretend, and believe because of cognitive dissonance, that there exists an intermediate position which would be the right one. The problem is that in all cases, we have simply not addressed the central question which is: how do we organize ourselves to produce together efficiently and harmoniously. If we take up the right-left opposition, the right says let's trust the elites, and the left says let the vote decide. In all cases, we focused the debate on Who decides, and we forgot to address the How?
Macronie, or even more clearly, the flexi-security of the countries of northern Europe, claims to find the solution by no longer an intermediate positioning between these two extremes, but by both at the same time, that is- that is to say very free entrepreneurs, and a State protective of individuals. With this vision, once again we evacuate the central question which is not how much power for entrepreneurs, but how they exercise power?

To show the importance of the how, let's return to the article Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony discussed in Chapter 3.
In this article, the word myth means that which is believed to be accurate without ever being verified. The right-wing myth is that entrepreneurs naturally organize businesses efficiently, so we just have to let them do it. However, Meyer and Rowan's article shows us that, contrary to appearances, entrepreneurs have an ideological and not a pragmatic vision of reality. What they consider to be effective management methods, and therefore which they implement, is never verified in terms of actual effectiveness. We gave the explanation in this same chapter: it is the cognitive dissonance which leads to the a posteriori justification of our decisions and not to decisions resulting from rational reasoning. In other words, the myth of the right is the myth of efficiency.

In summary, the third objection to social democracy is that it is inherently confrontational. Indeed, common agreement on an optimum level of regulation cannot exist, quite simply because this optimum level does not exist. Cognitive dissonance helps, those most privileged by nature, or inheritance, find that there is always too much regulation, the less privileged that there is not enough.
Common agreement requires reasonable decisions, which cannot be achieved in a complex system just by imposing prohibitions. However, this is what social democracy limits itself to doing. It is not the quantity that is bad, as each party asserts before each election, but the method. We will return to this in the second part of this book.

The widespread nepotism objection

We now come to the fourth objection to social democracy as a method of regulating capitalism. This objection is from our point of view the most profound. We indicated at the beginning of this chapter that putting progress at the service of all supposes limiting the proliferation of non-directly productive management, that is to say fighting against what we called Parkinson's Law in chapter 2. Let us recall that The effect of Parkinson's law is generalized nepotism, and the permanent stress that it induces on individuals. In capitalism, what limits the proliferation of management is quite simply the disappearance of companies and their replacement by new ones, that is to say what we call 'creative destruction'. This indirect way of obtaining the result has two disadvantages. On the one hand, it is socially brutal, and on the other hand, it is only partial. Now, if we come back to social democracy, the big problem is that the first effect of regulation is precisely to encourage the proliferation of management. In other words, the regulation of social democracy is both a remedy against inequalities and a poison, which promotes stress linked to generalized nepotism.
This could at first glance justify the ultra-liberal point of view which advocates the absence of obstacles to markets. However, as the means is indirect and not very effective, for creative destruction to effectively limit the proliferation of supervision over the long term, it must operate to the extreme, that is to say that the economy periodically collapses, which no one wants.
The solution is therefore to deal with the problem directly, instead of doing it through an indirect and crude effect. To do this, it is necessary to put in place a mechanism to limit the proliferation of management in companies, without the need to eliminate them periodically. This is what we will see in the second part of this book.

Other solutions from the philosophy of lights

Let us now review four other solutions put forward by the philosophers of the Enlightenment and their successors, basing ourselves again on the courses of Alain Supiot mentioned in chapter 5, which allow us to understand the humanist vision of the world both before Marx and Today.

Redistribution resolved

The first approach is that of a determined redistribution. The philosophers of the Enlightenment, drawing on the experience of Athens during Antiquity, and the scuttling of some Italian democracies in the Middle Ages, were well aware of the risk of civil war linked to the concentration of economic means in a minority of hands. . Let us therefore assume that we adopt today a radical measure of redistribution, as Solon did in Athens in his time, without falling into communism as proposed by Marx. We would thus remove the first objection that we had formulated with regard to the social-democratic approach, namely the too weak regulation of inequalities.
However, the second objection, that of ecology, would remain.
Ditto, concerning the fourth, which is that productivity gains linked to modern science favor the proliferation of management, therefore generalized nepotism, therefore permanent stress. If a single operational person is enough to feed not 1.1 but 10 people, then the non-operational people become the majority and take power.
This solution of simple energetic redistribution therefore appears insufficient in all cases. Indeed, as long as the technological level was low, productivity was low, and it was therefore difficult to fight against the temptation to resort to slavery, or another form of enslavement, which ultimately produced selective redistribution. . Then, when the technological level rises, there is the proliferation of supervision which can no longer be contained by simple redistribution.

Protected areas

The second approach is to exclude certain sectors from the market, as was done before the ultra-liberalist wave of the 1990s. Here, the problem is how do we avoid the proliferation of supervision in the non-market sector, since the creative destruction, which we have just mentioned in the fourth objection to social democracy, does not operate there. Let us point out that the proliferation of management mainly takes, in the non-profit sector, the form that is commonly called administrative bureaucracy.

Moral elitism

The third approach is Saint-Simonism, namely governance by virtuous meritocratic elites. However, even if we manage to establish a ruling social class which considers itself virtuous, and from which the bad apples are effectively excluded, Festinger's work on cognitive dissonance shows us that this ruling class will not work for all that. necessarily at the service of all.

Deliberative democracy

Finally, the fourth approach is the return to deliberative democracy in the public square. This aims to move away from what Alain Supiot calls 'governance by numbers', which consists of understanding the economy from above by means of macroeconomic indicators, to bring the decision down to the level of local assemblies where all the people involved in a decision have the effective possibility of taking part in the debate. We will now see that, exactly as in the case of the ecological objection to social democracy, it is progress itself which has made this solution impractical today.

The illusion of voting

Voting constitutes the main tool of the philosophy of enlightenment as inherited today. The goal of education for all is the means to enable citizens to fully exercise this right. Voting can take two forms: either the election of representatives within the framework of a representative democracy, or direct participation in decision-making within the framework of deliberative assemblies.

Let's take a look at what election is, in light of the elements of sociology that we introduced in chapters 2 and 3. We affirm here that election is not a good solution for the attribution of positions of power. Indeed, we affirm that the election favors the network, and that as a result, it favors demagoguery too much. All this has its origins in the fact that we too easily accept the merely plausible, which has the effect of making the exploitation of cognitive dissonance for electoral purposes decisive. In other words, to be elected, you have to limit the dissonance that you generate, therefore telling people what they believe and what they want. Complexity is not possible, sincerity is only possible at the margins.
Our post-war French elites could not accept the inapplicability of communism. Our elites of the 2000s cannot accept the inapplicability of the Enlightenment, that is to say, understand that a quality contradictory debate followed by a vote does not produce a reliable result because cognitive dissonance causes a extremely biased selection of arguments. This is obviously not an apology for dictatorship, or even for the enlightened monarch, but rather for reason as the result of an organized social effort instead of assuming that it is innate in cultivated individuals.

If we now move on to public deliberation, direct voting on decisions is not a solution either, because of the increasing complexity of the issues to be addressed, which is the price of technological progress. In chapter 4 concerning the decision-making process we saw that a rigorous decision-making process requires satisfying 4 conditions, the first of which is that the person leading the decision-making process has the necessary skills, and the second that they provide the amount of work required by the complexity of the subject.
Progress prohibits universally competent individuals, so making everyone vote leads to shifting the power of complex decisions to a small number of prescribing specialists.
Additionally, and most importantly, getting all citizens to vote requires everyone to study the subject individually, so each study will be extremely superficial at best.
Then, such a vote is very often the result of a bargain to obtain a majority, and the compromise solution may very well be the worst, because the least coherent.
Finally and above all, in the case of a vote, the ballot of each voter cannot be motivated, as for example a judgment can be, so if the decision turns out to be unsuitable, it is very difficult to go back by noting a methodological defect in the reasoning which led to the decision. Voting is the absence of security.

In summary, the fundamental problem with the philosophy of enlightenment is that it assumes that well-trained citizens, and a quality debate, are enough to produce a quality decision. This is based on the myth (in the sense of Meyer and Rowan) that the debate can make it possible to add the knowledge of the subject of each person, and ultimately lead to the equivalent of the constructed work that a single person, competent and competent, would deliver. impartial, in charge of the subject.
The classic excuse when we see in a practical case that it does not work is: the debate was not of good enough quality. However, on the one hand, the debate cannot be of good quality in general, quite simply because the main motivation of humans is social ambition, and not the search for truth. With few exceptions, people who speak during a debate are interested either in the personal prestige linked to a brilliant intervention, or in obtaining a final decision that would be favorable to them. On the other hand, at the end of the debate, the vote presents all the defects that we have just mentioned, and first and foremost, that of not being motivated by explicit reasoning that could be controlled.

At this point, the solution begins to emerge. The subject is not so much to properly select those responsible, whether by meritocracy or by election, nor to correctly involve as many people as possible through voting, but to ensure the relevance of each decision taken. , requiring that it be motivated by an in-depth analysis, which will be controlled from a methodological point of view. The challenge that we will have to take up to put progress at the service of all is therefore that illustrated in chapter 4, namely the production of rational decisions, by humans who are ambitious and very unrational.

The return to reason

After having considered the different solutions resulting from the philosophy of enlightenment, and before diving into the detail of the construction of a rational decision, let us take a step back, let us return to the scale of the history of humanity, this which brings us back to Dumézil's tripartition worldview seen in chapter 5. Capitalism is the passage of main power from the priestly function (reason) to the martial function (action). This shift took place crescendo, in three stages: firstly the discoveries of the New World, then the industrial revolution of the 19th century (Marx), and finally computerization and robotization (today). At the same time, we have witnessed an increase in complexity induced by the two technological revolutions, and the appearance of the Earth's capabilities as a limiting factor in our development, which makes the global or long-term consequences of actions more difficult. to apprehend. In fact, to build a solution, we must go beyond Marx's vision that capitalism is the primacy of capital over labor, to adopt a more Dumezilian register, that capitalism is the primacy of action over the reason.

Let us illustrate this with a few examples of the overvaluation of action and its corollary, speed, in our current culture. This overvaluation of action aims above all to promote acceptance by populations of the capitalist system, despite its inability to put progress at the service of all. A manager who asks for a summary, and makes a decision in three minutes, is not seen primarily as a smoker, but as a man capable of making decisions.
What is frowned upon is doing nothing, not working enough, but on the other hand spending your time getting restless due to lack of being well organized will not give rise to any opprobrium. Worse, a manager who puts pressure on his subordinates while dismissing their remarks concerning the inconsistencies of the work requested, and of the organization in place to accomplish it, with a simple 'I can't do anything about it', will not be deemed incompetent to supervise. Quite the contrary, as the book shows The stupidity paradox: The power and pitfalls of functional stupidity at work, the fact that he behaves martially is a guarantee of success.

We finally have all the elements to be able to formulate our solution to Marx's problem, which was how to make progress benefit everyone. The solution is an exit from capitalism, which does not consist above all of collectivizing. Indeed, the solution that we propose consists of switching back the predominant function from the martial, that is to say the action, to the sacerdotal, which must be understood taking into account the scientific method born in the 17th century, i that is to say reason and not dogma. The second part of this work will expose the associated social organization. For the moment, let's just present the decision-making process, which is at its heart.

The conditions for a reliable decision-making process

In Chapter 4, we showed that the current decision-making process is simply inept if we adopt the point of view of rationality. If this does not catch our eye in normal times, it is on the one hand because of the power of conditioning and habit, and on the other hand because of the fact that we are certainly victims of it in the long term. , but above all, constant accomplices. In other words, this system of reasoning is totally unsatisfactory with regard to our new moral expectations linked to technological know-how. But it is also a reflection of our nature inherited from our genetic evolution. And it is finally the effective engine which fuels populism.
Now let's see what a rational decision-making process could be. To do this, let's start by recalling the four conditions that must be satisfied jointly:
1. That the person leading the decision-making process has the necessary skills.
2. That it provides the amount of work required by the complexity of the subject.
3. That it be sincere in its conclusions as opposed to directing them according to a particular interest.
4. That she is not the victim of beliefs which would lead her to bias her conclusions in good faith.

The greatest difficulty to overcome in setting up a social organization which produces credible decisions, therefore well accepted by society as a whole, is to satisfy the fourth condition, namely that the reasoning is not biased in any good way. faith. In particular, how can we avoid the development of stereotypical reasoning, which only apes the state of the art, as revealed in the article by Meyer and Rowan discussed in Chapter 3? Likewise, how can we prevent the good faith of biased reasoning from being ensured by the simple recourse to social support, that is to say herd behavior, as formulated by Festinger in his theory of cognitive dissonance which we also mentioned in chapter 3?

The key is a methodological evaluation of the reasoning leading to the decision, that is to say not of the content, but of the solidity of the argument in the sense of the scientific method as presented at the beginning of chapter 22 In particular, the weakness of reasoning linked to the use of overly general heuristics, beliefs, as well as social support must be assessed. Let us now see the three points that must be put in place so that an effective evaluation of the methodological qualities of reasoning becomes possible.
1. Effectively combating the risk of resorting to overly general heuristics requires setting up training to determine whether all the conditions necessary for a statement to be true are met. This is logic, as described in Chapter 22, that forms the basis of modern science. So fighting effectively against the risk of resorting to overly general heuristics means restoring the study of logic in the mathematics program, as well as its application in other subjects, throughout the course, to train in determining the level reliability of each statement. Here, the problem with our current education is that it teaches to construct reasoning where we support a position through an argument that progresses in a linear manner (1). This is the natural arrangement for rhetoric. But science doesn't work like that at all. Indeed, each statement presupposes a set of conditions, so reasoning should take the form of an upside-down tree, that is to say a series of branches each group of which leads to a node which is the start of a larger branch, and so on until the final trunk which establishes the conclusion.
2. Fighting against beliefs also requires a change in the objectives of teaching. Indeed, the objective is no longer simply to acquire a body of knowledge, but to associate with each acquired knowledge the level of reliability reasonably attributable to this knowledge.
The aim of these first two points is to guide teaching so that the individual becomes capable of integrating reasoning whose basis is the accumulation of widely distributed but unreliable knowledge, as well as the reuse outside the context of better established scientific knowledge, does not ultimately produce a reliable conclusion. This involves significant initial work to assign a level of reliability to each piece of knowledge, which probably involves redefining the mission of the Academy of Sciences or the creation of a new academy. This is the taking into account, of the article Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony by Meyer and Rowan, discussed in Chapter 3.
3. Fighting the need for social support is easier. This is a simple exercise to be repeated periodically during education, which simply consists of noting and crossing out in a document all the arguments relating to social support.
It therefore clearly appears that training individuals capable of carrying out a serious methodological evaluation of reasoning is neither more nor less than a mission to be given to the education system. We will return a little later to the selection mechanism to be put in place to identify the individuals who have acquired the best skills at this level, and therefore to whom to entrust the methodological review of the reasoning leading to the most important decisions.

The third condition to ensure the seriousness of the decision-making process, namely the need for sincerity, would logically assume that the person conducting the study leading to the decision has no interest linked to this decision. This is a rather difficult condition to establish, because often no interest implies no link, and therefore no knowledge of the entity concerned by the decision and its environment.
For this reason, we will seek to obtain this condition preferably at the level of the person or people who will have to carry out the methodological evaluation of the reasoning leading to the decision.

We will only deal with the methods put in place to satisfy condition 2, namely the allocation of sufficient resources given the complexity of the subject, in the next chapter.

Finally, concerning the first condition, namely that the person who leads the decision-making process has the necessary skills, we will determine in Chapter 10 the methods of choosing the person to whom the development of the decision-making process is entrusted.
However, we will now address a difficulty related to this point, namely what to do when we cannot establish a solid reasoning? Indeed, the methodological evaluation of which we have just outlined runs the risk that, on certain difficult questions, we will not be able to establish solid reasoning to support the decision, and therefore that attempts to develop one decision after another is rejected, with the end result being a decision made just 'because it has to be over with'.This brings us to the need for an assessment of each individual's abilities to conduct methodologically sound reasoning, so as to be able to entrust the most complicated questions from the start to the most capable individuals in this regard. However, at this level, we cannot be satisfied with the initial training provided by the education system. To be able to build reasoning leading to the most involving collective decisions, and for these reasoning to be respected, and therefore accepted, one must have proven throughout one's life that one has the ability to conduct solid analyses, in accordance with the scientific method.
However, certain questions remain too difficult, regardless of the individual or group to whom they are entrusted, for reasoning leading to a decision to be satisfactory from the methodological point of view as mentioned previously, simply because there is not enough reliable applicable knowledge. In this case, there is no escaping a decision that is part gamble, part arbitrary choice. From then on, the social acceptance of the decision can either rest again on the power of the group which supports it, as currently, or on the respectability of the person or group which produced it, which seems more desirable to us.
This implies that all individuals must be subjected throughout their adult life to the development of reasoning leading to a decision, that this work must be evaluated methodologically as indicated previously, and that this must lead to the attribution each individual with a strategic rating, a bit like the ranking of individuals in certain sports such as tennis, or even chess.

Let us not forget, as we saw in Chapter 2, that the main motivation of individuals, in accordance with our genetic inheritance, is social advancement. Everything that serves as a social marker, whether money and external signs of wealth, power, honorary distinctions, is therefore attractive and likely to guide our behavior. From the moment the strategic rating becomes a public rating attributed to all individuals, it inevitably becomes a new fundamental social value, alongside money, and also influences the behavior of individuals, in a probably more virtuous way.

Having reached this point, we can see that even before possible implementation problems, we do not have a perfect solution for the development of well-accepted collective decisions. On the other hand, if we compare with what is currently done, the mechanics of which we dismantled in Chapter 4, and thus highlighted the dizzying conceptual weakness with regard to the four conditions necessary for a rigorous decision-making process, we can also note that , subject to respecting the precautions that we have just mentioned, this is indeed a complete overhaul of the social contract, and not just an improvement of institutions.
Hence the obvious remark: all this is all well and good on paper, but how does it work in practice?

Revision of the declaration of human rights

To do this, let us start from the current framework which governs the functioning of production organizations, businesses or administrations. It consists of two main elements. On the one hand, the legislative framework, which specifies what organizations must absolutely do, and must never do. On the other hand, accounting rules, which specify how an organization must formalize the use of its resources. We have separated this second point from the first, because it constitutes an extension of the rules which allowed the efficient and detailed collection of tax, that is to say the establishment of a modern State, with systems of redistribution to ensure a certain social justice, and possibly free or near-free certain services such as education or health. In other words, accounting is a methodological constraint, a formalism imposed on businesses, which allows the establishment of a modern State.

Let's quickly review everything we've seen since the beginning of this book. First of all, Marx's observation that the industrial revolution caused a considerable complexity of the production system, further amplified by the second industrial revolution of digital technology and robotics. Then the current observation that the Earth has become the limiting factor in development possibilities. Let's face all this with the cognitive dissonance which leads individuals, even well-trained ones, to behave in a largely irrational manner, with the result of management that is based more on myths than reason, and distrust of elites which is gradually creeping in.
We therefore understand that what will have to be strengthened to find a harmonious social organization is rationality in the decision-making process, and for this we are going to propose adding, alongside the accounting constraint, a methodological constraint, to namely a new formalism imposed on organizations, which ensures the quality of decisions. The goal is to finally respond satisfactorily to the two major issues of our time, which are on the one hand how to ensure that everyone benefits from technological progress, and on the other hand how to respect the limits linked to the Earth's capacity. The effect must also be to restore confidence in the elites, and therefore reestablish a widely accepted social contract. Finally, this formalism must make it possible to contain the effects of social ambition denounced in Chapter 2, namely generalized nepotism, and the permanent stress that it induces on individuals.

From a philosophical point of view, this amounts to recasting Article 4 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789 : we keep for the moment the substance "Freedom consists of being able to do everything which does not harm others", which we will only call into question in chapter 22, but we now review the form. From "The limits can only be determined by law", we move on to a specification of the means of decision to take into account the complexity of modern societies and the limits of earth's resources: "Any decision whose consequences significantly involve others, including included in future generations, must be developed rationally, with means in line with the challenges. »

In the second part of this book, we will present the implementation in more detail.

(1)
The structure of human languages u200bu200bis linear. It is modeled by spoken language, which only functions in dimension 1, time. In fact, human languages u200bu200bare only adapted to rhetoric, that is to say a succession of simply juxtaposed arguments, which aims to obtain support by accumulation. However, to be able to easily present rigorous reasoning, we need the notion of parenthesing which we find in mathematics and computer science. Parenthesing is what allows you to correctly structure a proposition of the type 'If A₁ and A₂ and A₃... then B' and to nest the propositions into each other. Once we have parentheses, we need two additional notions. On the one hand a representation in dimension 2, to be able to make the nestings more explicit. This is found in its embryonic state for mathematical functions, and more generally in certain computer languages u200bu200bsuch as Pliant which use indentation to materialize certain levels of parenthesing. In addition, we need the notion of reference, so as not to have to expose the entire reasoning in the form of a single highly interwoven expression, but to start by exposing certain sub-parts which will simply be cited later in more propositions. large. This is the notion of lemma in mathematics and functions in computer science. The problem with human languages u200bu200bat this level is the weakness of the conventions which govern the system of reference. Current readers are not trained in structured texts as opposed to linear ones, so if we massively used the notions of parenthesing and cross-reference to establish more rigorous reasoning, the readers' reflex would undoubtedly be to give up understanding the text. Obviously, they would use the social support of cognitive dissonance to convince themselves that it is the text which is poorly structured instead of admitting that it is they who have a learning effort to make.
This brings us back to the need for the educational system to acquire this capacity, which in turn requires establishing a single convention for representing the notions of parenthesing and referral, as is the case in mathematics, and in each computer language. .