policy analysis

One world is falling apart, the new one's ready...

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For several decades now, different intellectuals have succeeded one another in announcing the end of one paradigm and the emergence of a new one. In all fields, the landmarks of the past are shattered by crises of meaning. Individually and collectively, everyone feels that the values and foundations of the old paradigm are crumbling and that something else is emerging. However, for more than 25 years, this has appeared more like concepts, for some an unattainable utopia. And now, everywhere, in all fields, the concrete creations of the Cultural Creatives are emerging, those who carry the values and actions of the emerging paradigm, the "RenaiSens". [1] is here in the spring of 2017.

Germs visible Renaissance

Phe various disciplines have gradually seen the development of their alternative, ecology, promoted by Nicolas Hulot and Jean-Marie Pelt in the media, agrobiology demonstrated by Pierre Rabhi and now supported by the large Hummingbird network, and also the awareness of the link with living organisms, which is reflected in biomimicry.
The thinking of the paradigm to come, strongly expressed by Edgar Morin, is finally seeing concrete fruits and operational translations germinate in all fields. The one that has been slow to change is that of politics. Indeed, the field is complex enough to have frightened the majority of citizens. To this must be added that the territory was also jealously guarded, prerogatives confiscated and knowledge quite inaccessible. The oligarchy, to paraphrase Hervé Kempfis so powerful and self-sufficient that it has long resisted citizen innovation.
 
It took the combination of several factors, the audacity of several Cultural Creatives, including those from Generation Y, and the audacity of young political professionals to come up with real, concrete and sufficiently constructed alternatives to demonstrate that another world is possible. Several years of trial and error were necessary. [2] but today, in 2017, at the decisive moment of both presidential and legislative elections, concrete proposals are ready, real, viable and proven.
When everyone lies to you all the time, the result is not that you believe these lies, but that no one believes anything anymore.
A people who can no longer believe in anything cannot form an opinion.
It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to judge. And with such a people, you can do whatever you like.
Hannah Arendt

Why such regressions?

With the election of Donald Trump, we are marking a decisive turning point in our democracy, an unparalleled regression. The United States had elected film actors, which made the international political class smile, but most of them were able to play their part, even if we owe to Ronald Reagan the great deregulation that led to the subprime crisis in 2007-2008.
But with Donald Trump, we are witnessing the excesses of reality TV and social networks used on the political scene. And this to represent the most important and strategic political position for the world. What yesterday seemed impossible is today a reality, connoted by all the conservatism and regression associated with environmental or societal decision-making.
 
In France, our elections are a few months behind those in the United States and we are witnessing something incredible, every candidate in the presidential elections is subject to vindictiveness and denigration. Questionable cases come out for each one, discrediting them one after the other. This is nothing new, it has been practiced "always", but it is the virulence and the systematic aspect that leads one to question what is happening beyond the visible phenomena.
Whether it is the result of political manipulation, certainly, that the media are using themselves to blacken the picture, is indisputable, but this groundswell effect that seems to sweep all the "classic" candidates in its wake is above all the manifestation of something much more consequential. In the political field, we are experiencing the tidal wave of the paradigm shift. The RenaiSens is there, but the positions are so advantageous that the political class as a whole is resisting the change.

A posture in disarray

Moreover, the position of governor can no longer be held. The Presidents of the Republic, advised by communication experts, have led to the trivialization of the function. In wanting to make themselves accessible, it is the function itself that is collapsing. The excessive use of social networks has distorted access to this special position. The difference in the use of media by Barack Obama and Donald Trump shows that with the same means of dissemination and communication the result can be completely reversed.
Let's also remember the voodoo dolls for the 2007 elections for Ségolène Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy or the images published during the election of François Hollande on social networks. If citizens no longer know how to respect "authority"... [3]...it's mostly that she no longer gives signs to be respectable.
 
With social networks and in the digital age, everyone is accessible and that is a good thing; the horizontalization of exchanges rather than the pyramid aspect is a desirable development and lays the foundations for cooperation and opens up a world of more equivalence. However, living among peers does not preclude respect and distance so that everyone can exercise their mandate properly. Not being able to hold one's own is due to the fact that the exercise of politics, i.e. serving the city and its citizens, has become the means of having a good career and earning a good living. This shift has not escaped anyone's notice, and over time, the majority of citizens have become aware of it.
 
The first reaction was the distancing of citizens from politics, a disenchantment that was reflected both in declining membership in political parties or trade unions and in the disaffection of polling stations. But following 2001 and the 2002 elections, when Jean-Marie Le Pen was almost elected President of the Republic, these electroshocks awakened consciences and began to mobilise some citizens to want to build alternatives.
It is the sum of our individual consciences that makes our world evolve towards chaos or harmony.
Sylvain Thillaye du Boullay

The gradual rise in the level of consciousness

For about fifteen years the road was quite laborious to change consciences and to make everyone aware of the importance of taking charge of themselves and becoming actors in the political sphere again.
With the Internet and social networks, whose appropriation also corresponds to the last fifteen years, particularly in France - (generalization of uses, increase in speeds to facilitate information and development of technologies to make all kinds of applications) - it is also the immediate generalization of alternatives and thus the acceleration of transformations.
As we approach 2017, a significant number of citizens have set out on the road, notably via civic-tech to make democracy evolve. Several attempts have been made since the European elections, in particular with Real Democracy. [4] so that citizens take direct control of politics. The Civic Pact, the Roosevelt Collective, Bleu Blanc Zèbre and other movements had emerged, but they all fell under several flaws, the difficulty to "embark" the youngest and the temptation to become a party and thus fall into the flaws of the system, vote "right" or "left" in the second round and thus make silent any expression of alternative citizens.

Paradigm shift comes into action

Today in 2017, initiatives are pushing outside the system, while having sufficient knowledge of the latter to precisely bring a real, viable, concrete and sustainable alternative. There was the election of Saillans [5] for the municipal elections where the entire population decided to stand as a candidate and thus create a break in the traditional vision of the rather pyramidal college elections. A new vision of direct democracy was taking shape and with it a new form of governance, participatory and collegial.
Also noteworthy is the movement #MaVoice which has several distinctive features: remaining an independent movement and not being a party, functioning without an institutional leader, impellers who remain discreet, speeches that are made by several people and without ever having a dedicated communication officer, everything is based on volunteering, everyone contributes like a hive of bees in the form of collective intelligence and without hierarchy. This movement which aims to hack the National Assembly brings a new breath to democracy and aims to restore the body where laws are voted to the citizens, by favouring direct democracy.
 
Also note the remarkable momentum of convergence "Citizens Stadium" which aims to bring together 80,000 people at the Stade de France to recreate a genuine citizens' agora nourished by the diversity of each person and attempting to rethink politics together. The objective of Stade Citoyens is to : "Bring together and connect 80,000 people to experience a 21st century agora; Put a very large public infrastructure at the service of the emergence of a society of good living; Experiment with tools of collective intelligence, democratic innovations, digital tools of the Civic-tech [6] To be positively inspired by artists and actors of change from civil society networks; To make visible citizen solutions that can be easily appropriated. »[7]
 
The political sphere is therefore now well occupied by the youngest and a growing majority of citizens who find in these spaces the opportunity to explore possibilities, to express their ideas, to co-create and to bring real renewal to a collapsing system.

Erosion of the system: the birth of the soft and powerful revolution

Indeed, we are ready for the collapse of the Fifth Republic and the emergence of the Sixth.
Like other areas, politics has become above ground, to use Pierre Rabhi's favourite expression. It is becoming more than necessary to rethink a new constituent [8] in order to bring about a democratic formula that avoids collusion of powers.
 
After being literally above ground in our cities cut off from life and the awareness of biological rhythms, then above ground economically, finance decorating the gold dollar, and also above ground symbolically, depriving us of the rituals that helped keep society together and allowed each person to move forward in life by accepting its stages and thresholds, or above ground spiritually, cut off from access to transcendence, especially following the separation of Church and State. And finally above ground politically with men and women politicians who no longer nourish the City but their only career and ambition.
 
So just like a floor from which the forest is removed, the system erodes and today it is completely disintegrating and reminds us of the end of Rome.
It is the labile aspect of changing candidates, the new parties that emerge with each new egos crisis that leads us today, a few weeks away from the presidential elections, to no longer know who to vote for. Each candidate falling prey to the media and the worst archaic reactions of needing to denigrate or even "kill" one candidate after another.
This systematic deadly attitude is indeed the reflection of a momentum, broader than the drifting behaviour of some journalists who justify their nickname of scavengers more than honouring their profession, as some still do, respecting their duty of reserve and the ethics of investigation.
These assassinations politicians recall the sacrifices on the altar of a God of ancient mythologies, to bring the time to come.
We are talking about the visible signs of the erosion of a system that is now collapsing and will soon disappear as it has used up all the resources of its deviation.

From the Arab Spring to French-style political renewal: a gentle, non-violent and powerful revolution

Today with the spring of 2017 we are witnessing a real renewal of politics in France and it is time for the media to give space and visibility to what is emerging and which is not a fantasy of circumstance but the expression of a societal tsunami.
Indeed, what everyone had been waiting for for several years or decades, depending on whether they were involved in the paradigm shift, was for the alternative to be ready to provide a concrete response to a collapsing system. This is what was largely missing in the Arab Spring, when the people were fed up and faced with the vacancy of a constructed, solid and real response, the worst regressions have seeped into the wide open faults. The most radical Islamists then seized the opportunity to set back democracies and social progress.

In conclusion

With the American election, we see that in the face of the complexity of the world, the specific identity of this emerging paradigm, it is the worst radicalisms and conservatisms that return in force to provide binary responses to the plural reality of the world.
Thus, the novelty of 2017 lies not so much in the ideas, although some of them are particularly innovative, due to the liberated citizen creativity, but rather in the fact that the ideas become real actions co-developed in real collective intelligence. And these actors are driven by the slogan "we are the ones we have been waiting for". And here we see the citizens themselves taking the City back into their own hands.
 
Evidence shows that governance based on trust and shared governance leads to concrete results that can change the face of the world. Indeed, civic tech [9] are the result of international cooperation, often anonymous, using digital technologies in the service of a policy that is once again becoming the expression of citizens for citizens.
And the most remarkable thing is that in our Revolution-loving country, we have been able to move from the bloody Revolution of 1789 to the non-violent, cooperative one, which brought thousands of people in a few months, in the service of all and without cutting off any heads. 
 
 
[1] Entering a world of cooperation. Pour une néo-RenaiSens, Chronique Sociale, 2013.

[2] The 9/11 fantasy. From the ashes a new world emerges, White Truck, 2013.

[3] Let us recall that contrary to the misinterpretation of the behaviors of Generation Y, its members are not "against" authority systematically, but against that which is "unjust". And today the manifestation of the State and elected officials is no longer credible because it is no longer based on ethical predicates and in the service of the City. So, in the face of this drift, some people oppose it and act as a mirror, discrediting those who no longer represent it.

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