Introduction

This introduction presents three aspects of this book: its subject, the method chosen, and the form.

Object

The purpose of this book is to propose a model of society compatible with the aspirations of people in the 21st century.

In the 17th century modern science was born, namely the trio of experimentation, publicity of results and conclusions with precise description of experimental conditions, verification and criticism by all. From the 19th century onwards, this led to an unprecedented technological leap in the history of humanity, which revolutionized our relationship with nature: thanks to our technical know-how, we acquired the ability to protect ourselves from the greatest scourge. which was starvation, as well as literally exploding labor productivity in many activities.
Yet, as early as the 19th century, observers such as Zola and Marx noticed that something was amiss. Indeed, progress (1) seems to serve some to the detriment of others for whom the situation even seems to get worse. This is still largely true at the start of the 21st century, except that the victims of progress tend to be concentrated in certain countries.
What is wrong is that science has not produced an objective and effective method of organizing human societies, and that in fact, the methods of government have become archaic in view of our new power linked to technology, and the aspirations that result from it.

From a system before the 17th century where power was primarily aristocratic, the scientific and technological revolution shifted power everywhere toward capital. This is what Marx describes, and he announces that the people must inevitably regain power to counter the perverse effects linked to this shift.
However, on the one hand the seizure of power by the proletariat did not take place everywhere, and on the other hand, when it did take place, it ultimately produced a simple new temporary shift of power towards politics this time -this, which did not resolve the initial problems of the incapacity of the social system to put progress at the service of all.
Finally, in the 20th century, the absence of an alternative ended up giving rise to another form of protest that Marx had not anticipated, more negative because it led even more inevitably to tyranny: populism.

Let's put it simply: Marx's great strength is to have analyzed with precision the nature and mechanics of the perversion of the capitalist system, where Zola and the other realist novelists were content to describe its effects. Marx's great weakness is to have led people to think that it was enough to overthrow the system for the problem to be resolved. But history regularly shows us that reversing things without precisely planning what comes next is very risky. We will not venture into knowing whether Marx was aware of the limits of his work or not, but the subject of this book is to go so far as to propose a complete and coherent system of social organization, adapted to the new capabilities that the scientific and technological revolution has provided to humans.

Method

To achieve this objective, we have composed this book in three parts:

The first part, consisting of chapters 1 to 7, takes up Marx's analysis and updates it in the light of subsequent contributions from history and the social sciences.

The second part, consisting of chapters 8 to 12, describes the heart of the proposed organizational system, namely how to organize production, justifying each point by its connection with the elements of the first part.
The originality of this organization is to avoid the two shortcomings that we find in practically all proposals for previous social organizations, namely, having individual virtue as the keystone of the system is that is, suppose the miraculous emergence of a new, more righteous or altruistic humanity, or ultimately justify the oppression of the weak by the strong by presenting it as natural or positive.

Finally, the third part, consisting of chapters 13 to 22, addresses a whole series of transformations to be made in related areas to ensure coherence, and therefore the viability of the whole.

The second part immediately shows that we have chosen a collective solution, in the tradition of the Enlightenment thinkers, then of Marx, and in opposition to Krishnamurti who advocated individual liberation. This in no way means that we consider that the individual solution is not valid, but we consider that it only concerns a minority, and is therefore not likely to allow us to tame the power resulting from the technological revolutions of in recent centuries within a reasonable time frame to avoid an ultimate ecological or military catastrophe.
In addition, we deal with the individual aspect in chapter 22, which can very well be read directly following the first part. However, this reading shows that the main justification for the recommendations that we make individually is their effect of reducing conflict, that is to say their collective effect. In other words, the most important constraints are on the collective level, and not on the individual level. It is logical to center the book on the collective aspect, and to only deal with the individual aspect at the end.

At the methodological level, this work is based on two pillars. The first is to start by understanding what human nature is, as opposed to what we would like it to be. The second is the cross-checking of themes to properly evaluate the robustness of the proposed system from all angles.
Starting from 'what is man?', that is to say specifying what we have inherited from evolution in terms of capacities, limits and behavioral predispositions, seemed to us to be common sense for a book which deals with issues of social organization, and yet... it seems never to have been done, as if what the deep nature of man is was obvious from the simple fact that we meet men every day ! Defining human nature more precisely will therefore be the subject of our first part. The goal is to subsequently build the social system as a good complement to fill the gaps linked to the imperfection of our genetic evolution. In contrast, the models of society previously proposed are based on an implicit and above all simply plausible vision of man, that is to say very largely arbitrary, as has been done since Antiquity, and as a result, the The resulting reasoning, although possibly brilliant, is not based on anything solid. On the other hand, we will take the greatest care here to base our vision of human nature on the few solid foundations which have been able to be established in accordance with the modern scientific method, and for this, we will mainly look towards sociology and not from philosophy, which constitutes the first singularity of this work.
If the drastic choice that we made among the available theories, as opposed to an encyclopedic approach which would have consisted of presenting them all on an equal footing, can be justified by the scientific and relevant nature of the few retained, on the other hand, we draw lessons that go beyond what the authors of this research themselves have formulated. For example, documentary Caribbean primates in Chapter 2 we will deduce the notion of generalized nepotism. But above all, we are making new connections between observations from different fields, for example by comparing this documentary to the work of C. Northcote Parkinson. Therefore, there is a danger since we risk falling back into disguised arbitrariness, very fashionable these days in terms of management methods, for example, where we make fundamental sciences say, as for example neuroscience, things it does not say, adding arbitrary extrapolation or simplistic and dubious analogies.

This is where our second methodological pillar comes in, namely the third part, which aims to secure the proposition through the importance of the overlaps. This is the second singularity of this work, namely not treating in depth, as is usually done, a single aspect of social life, for example justice. Thus we will propose a general organization which covers all the main lines, and whose justification is linked not only to the scientific origin of the bases which served us to establish our vision of human nature in the first part, but also to the coherence of the whole. To explain this overlapping process, we will cite Jean-Marie Guyau in Outline of a morality without obligation or sanction : “The truth is not only what we feel or what we see, it is what we explain, what we connect. Truth is a synthesis: this is what distinguishes it from sensation, from raw fact; it is a bundle of facts. It does not draw its evidence and its proof from a simple state of consciousness, but from all the phenomena which hold together and support each other. One stone does not make a vault, nor two stones, nor three; you need them all; they must rely on each other; even the vault built, tear out a few stones, and everything will collapse: the truth is thus it consists in a solidarity of all things. » We will complete this methodological explanation at the beginning of the third part.
In summary, the originality and scope of this book lie in three points: first the original selection of theories based on experiments consistent with modern scientific method to shed light on what human nature is, then the equally unprecedented between theories from different fields, and finally the cross-checking to ensure the validity of the whole.

Finally, the choice to take Marx as a starting point is the result of two observations: on the one hand Marx does not just denounce social poverty, but he carries out an in-depth analysis of the causes, which remains largely relevant to understanding the situation current; on the other hand, the remedies he suggests are those that led to the current Western system, namely social democracy. To understand this, we still need to get rid of the collective imagination, resulting from the ideological confrontation of the Cold War, which reduces Marx to Marxism, that is to say the seizure of power by the proletariat and the collectivization of means of production in application of Communist Party Manifesto of which he is co-author with Engels. However, Marx's work cannot be reduced to this pamphlet. His major work, to which we refer here, is Capital, which not only provides a much more in-depth analysis of the causes, but also outlines the more moderate regulatory solutions that will be implemented in the West in the 20th century, namely compulsory education and the labor code.

Shape

Concerning the form now, following Jean-Marie Guyau's architectural metaphor, we would like this book to be read like a cathedral. Indeed, the visitor to a cathedral who is content to focus his attention on the aesthetics of each stone, one after the other, instead of concentrating on the overall structure, is likely to leave very disappointed. . The same is true of this book: the reader who is content to focus his attention on the style of each sentence, instead of trying to see the overall structure, is likely to be similarly disappointed.
Our goal is to allow a new vision to spread in society, and for this, we also address young adults and people whose job it is to do, and not just intellectuals. To facilitate understanding, we have therefore adopted a school style, perhaps to the detriment of the pleasure of reading.

Just one last warning before we begin. The other stylistic specificity of this book is its density. Certain concepts, which could have justified an entire book on their own, are covered here in less than a page, so to get the most out of them, you should considerably reduce your reading speed.

(1)
We define progress here as the increase in technological capabilities.