Society reinvents itself in all directions

Jan 23, 2019 | Articles

Society is transformed by individuals and it is also metamorphosing by changes in the way it operates.

When artists contribute to collective awareness

Artists’ commitment to social and environmental issues has become commonplace. A landmark initiative is the preparation of a “Requiem for Humanity” by the composer Vangelis. We know the considerable importance of music to collectively reveal great individual paths. Music was instrumental in accelerating the process of metamorphosis in the second half of the 20th century. This Requiem in preparation by the composer Vangelis could have a considerable impact at a time when awareness is increasingly important on disorders of all kinds: economic, social, climatic…

An orchestra without a conductor: The Dissonances

The adventure of the Les Dissonances orchestra began in 2004 with a Christmas concert in support of the homeless in the heart of Paris, in the Châtelet-Les Halles district. This means that attention to others and the world is at the heart of the project.

Returning from a period of retreat in the Libyan desert, David Grimal, a young international soloist, had decided to “find the way of others”. The Dissonances have become the only philharmonic orchestra in the world invited to play the great repertoire regularly, in the largest concert halls, without the presence on stage of a conductor. The hundred musicians present, strong of their skills and their sensitivity that nothing compels only obey what their knowledge of the work dictates and let themselves be led by the concern they have of each other through the role assigned to each of the composer.

David Grimal says it well, with his words and his sensitivity: “It is an adventure of friendship, of love of life, of music, of people; a society of men and women believing in their collective intelligence in the age of the development of artificial intelligence. This example is of particular interest to entrepreneurs. To find the path of others, in the company, is to enable the development of employees and to bring useful goods and services to customers while respecting the social balances and the health of the territories, today and tomorrow. This in no way calls into question the existence of an authority that becomes a problem only when it is abused, when it ceases to care for others. The verticality of a relationship of authority does exist, in the orchestra, as in the company, it is exercised through assumed but freely accepted leadership, no necessity chaining the musicians to the orchestra.

Crazy Toads, Street Innovation, Thanh Nghiem and David Li

Crazy toads are those who, in order to reach the pond and reproduce in the mating season, do not cross the roads at the risk of being run over by cars but who seek another way, in this case the small tunnels created for them, by humans. These toads that come out of their ancestral routine are the image of the innovators of metamorphosis. Thanh Nghiem spots them in the world.  The mad toad is the deviant who saves the species and makes people aware of the dangers that threaten.

One example of a crazy toad acting on the ground is David Li. He had the idea to study what is happening in Shenzhen on the street where innovation is developing for and by people. He posts that the production of the Internet can be opened. David Li’s teams have created a robot that weeds on its own. Its artificial intelligence is capable of detecting good and weeds. For organic production, this allows humans not to break their backs. By creating a platform, Shenzhen Open Innovation Laboratory, it allows everyone to prototype any object: smartphones, drones, electric vehicles, etc. In France, Wiko became the second largest phone manufacturer in less than a year thanks to this system. David Li is the modern-day Robin Hood who wants to work for the benefit of all with the “Goods for good” principle.

Reinventing the way we make society around a project to fight exclusion and poverty.

Last September, the association “Convergences” brought together 5,000 people from civil society in Paris to devise new solutions against precariousness and poverty. Around the theme “Make Society Tomorrow, Make Tomorrow” participants worked on five themes of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals: good health and well-being, quality education, decent work and economic growth, sustainable cities and communities, partnerships for achieving the goals. For two days, actors from the public sector, the business world, the media, and civil society met. In addition to the great success of the event, it is worth noting the presence of many institutions that have come to seek inspiration on these major themes as well as support the initiative. This confirms that the metamorphosis is gaining all organizations.

The social fabric of proximity is strengthening, another sign that metamorphosis requires the enrichment of the “collective”

Cyria Emelianoff is an assistant professor at the University of Le Mans on “collective capabilities”. “Capabilities” are collective abilities/skills.

From the perspective of citizen transition and concrete transformation of the environment, she sees that the neighbourhood becomes a resource. Like Pierre Giorgini, she highlights the concept of an expanded campus that would be anchored in the territory and would help to break the silos.

According to her, the steps to be taken are:

  • Make the walls permeable,
  • Allowing a free-flowing flow, horizontality,
  • Encouraging cohabitation with the living,
  • Promote the values of hospitality, openness, “living together” in peace,
  • Promoting cooperation, and building capacities for alliances between collectives,
  • Staying the course of transition, which is not an end in itself but a condition of survival.

What is particularly interesting here, from the point of view of “metamorphosis”, is the rearrangement of the collective from a perspective that breaks the old relational patterns, allows to multiply the efforts of each by complementarity, opens up perspectives of new solutions. This is a step further than the organization of the event organized by “Convergences”.

The city transformed through networks

Aware of the role they have to play in the transformations of the world, under the combined pressure of the progress of the digital economy and climate and environmental pressure, cities are creating alliances, beyond states, on multiple themes: climate, resilience, smart cities, heritage, local currencies or even learning cities. Ilya Prigogine said that “cities are the very example of a complex dissipative system.”

At the same time, at the local level, initiatives are multiplying around organic agricultural production, alternative education, shared transport…, showing the maturity of a society ready to welcome metamorphosis.

The latest analysis of the phenomenon of third places in France: the very comprehensive report, “Making together to live better together” recently given by Patrick Levy-Waitz to Julien Denormandie, the Secretary of State to the Minister for the Cohesion of territories, which demonstrates the diversity of local initiatives throughout the national territory.

Places that meet the expectations of cooperation, mobility, creativity and singularity that cross our society.
The transformed city is already today!

Bringing life back to fragile territories

In the 1970s, as they undertook the rehabilitation of a ruined hamlet in the Ardèche gorges with youth yards, Gérard and Béatrice Barras discovered by chance a spinning of wool whose roof collapsed in a lost valley an hour away. Confident in the capacity of collective action, and motivated to act on the development of this abandoned rural area, they mobilize a team of young people by offering to experiment with cooperation for the purpose of local economic development.

It will not be a question of making a museum or even a spinning, but of restructuring a local sector in order to enhance the wools that are discarded by generating a few jobs. SCOP Ardelaine was founded in 1982. Tonting sheep, transforming wool into bedding, marketing in a short circuit, the cooperative is growing and creating new jobs every year.

In 1986, she set up a knitting and clothing workshop in a sensitive area of the city of Valencia. The co-operators are then challenged to translate their approach to rural local development to an over-densified urban area. Two hectares of gardens shared at the foot of the building, will be the most visible fruits. To strengthen its territorial roots, activities are expanding to include tourism and culture. One, then two, museum courses will be created, drawing 20,000 visitors a year to this historic site. The cooperative, which then defines itself as a “Territorial Cooperative”, will continue its development by diversifying its activities to the local food sector. A restaurant, a cannery open to all users of the territory, will be created in 2010, as well as a café-library open all year round. Today Ardelaine has 54 employees and is certified by the State “Living Heritage Company”.

MONTREAL'S DECLARATION IN FAVOUR OF RESPONSIBLE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Dec 20, 2018 | Articles

This is the first fruit of a very interesting approach with citizen deliberations and co-construction with various stakeholder
s: the Montreal Declaration for responsible AI development.

The key points of the outcome of the citizens' consultations revolve around seven themes, each with its indicative questions and a principle recommended in the draft declaration.

The proposed principles:

  • Well-being: The development of AI should ultimately be about well-being.
  • Autonomy: The development of AI should promote the autonomy of all human beings and responsibly control that of computer systems.
  • Justice: The development of AI should aim to eliminate discrimination, including discrimination related to gender, age, mental and physical abilities, sexual orientation, ethnic and social origin and religious beliefs.
  • Privacy: The development of AI should allow people who use it to access their personal data as well as the types of information that an algorithm uses.
  • Knowledge: The development of AI should promote critical thinking and protect us from propaganda and manipulation.
  • Democracy: The development of AI should promote informed participation in public life, cooperation and democratic debate.
  • Responsibility: The various players in AI development should take responsibility for working against the risks of these technological innovations.

EUROPEANS AS-A-BRAIN

Dec 19, 2018 | Articles

While European political and media news informs us every day about the risks of a break-up of the European project, another approach to Europe is emerging and strengthening on which too few observers are looking. This is a non-administrative Europe, a Europe of networks on concrete projects seem to be looking its way.

Following the presentation in Delphi of the book Praise of Metamorphosis, Raymond Van Ermen focused the European conference in Milan in May 2018 on sustainable development on the theme "Europeans-as-a-brain", paraphrasing Alain de Vulpian's phrase "society-as-a-brain".

Europeans need to organize themselves as-a-brainers and concrete projects are already at work. The final agreement states: "On 31 May 2018, in Milan, we launched a European operation as a brain to ensure that networks, partnerships and initiatives contributing to the climate agreement work together to meet the need to make a leap forward, including towards a 'new social contract'." The European-like-a-brain initiative will begin as a European ecosystem of organisations and processes focused on the five priorities.

A first list of partners in this "European-a-brain ecosystem" has been sketched out.

An urgent need for "catalysts leaders for public action"

Dec 15, 2018 | Articles

In 2015, Alain de Vulpian wrote in Praise of Metamorphosis:  "The representative and partisan democracy we practice is at odds with the new society, which feels excluded from power and begins to challenge its legitimacy. The authoritarian and bureaucratic governance we have inherited becomes ineffective and produces turbulence when it intervenes in a hyper-complex and functioning society. The resulting mis-governance pits the people against the elites. The tutelary state and the uniform social protection system that we built in the middle of the 20th century are slowly unravelling and taking a back-and-forth a society that aims to optimize the particular situation of each. The European Union between two chairs is paralyzed. As a result of these misalignments, the governments of most of our countries and the Governments of the Union are losing their effectiveness and unable to adequately support our development in the context of the ongoing globalisation. They do not provide the common good that people's society expects. Our people are suffering and are demoralized. They accuse the governing elites, both national and European, of being responsible for their misfortune and brutally challenge them in the ballot box as well as in the streets. Serious political crises could disrupt the metamorphosis. »

The Yellow Jackets, the movement that shakes France

There was originally a childish side, playful in the yellow vests. The originality of these movements that develop in social networks is that there is no leader, no organization with which the public authorities can discuss. They don't want to be represented.  We are in the complexity of "dissipative systems", self-regulation is done or not done, this depends on each member of the networks and in reality internal and external manipulations. Physical pressures can go a long way. There is a profound ambiguity: yellow vests probably don't care about ecology because personally, in the short term, they first look for ways out in their daily lives. What did they originally propose? Let's listen to them? That we listen to mayors and other forms of organization? But their disenchantment has crystallized on a person, their "indignations" manipulated by extremism, turning into anger that can be violently destructive. We urgently need "catalysts for public action" in situations of extreme complexity. It would be acute socioperceptives that would feel the main dynamics of the ongoing metamorphosis. They would be at the origin of "hybrid collectives" where socio-receptor agents could meet, coming from public authorities, intermediary bodies, trade unions, associations… Can they play their role as natural self-organizers in a complex system? Metamorphosis also means turning even serious crises into opportunities. It's the caterpillar that becomes a butterfly. What will socioperceptive, creative "imaginal cells" do? Could this movement, now reclaimed by political extremism, be, could it have been an opportunity for Emmanuel Macron to abandon technocratic expertise and get back to the daily reality by being more attuned to people's society? The future is not decreed.

Interview with Alain de Vulpian – EMCC 2018

May 29, 2018 | Videos

A  description of the evolution of Human Being and a research on the evolution of our societies. The anthropo-sociologist Alain de Vulpian was the founder of COFREMCA, a  company dedicated to action-research  accompanying  the biggest French or  international companies (as Royal Dutch Shell, De Beers…) , advised many governments, writes an important book (awarded by Académie Française)  that gave the theme of the  EMCC symposium  2018  “Eloge de la métamorphose” « Praise of Metamorphosis ».  

Interview conducted in January 2018 with Irene Dupoux-Couturier and Caroline Gerber of SOL France and Yann de Pontbriand, Treasurer, Gabriel Hannes, President of EMCC France.

ENGLISH TRANSCRIPTION

I was a student at Sciences Po at the end of the 1940s, when I told myself “we’re coming out of a horrific half century, is there anything we could have done to avoid Stalin, could we have avoided Hitler?”. We had the impression that we were maybe coming out of that, with the triumph of democracies, but it wasn’t entirely clear. And, together with 2 or 3 of my colleagues,  while were still at Sciences Po we said, we’re not going to go the ENA (Ecole National d’Administration), which had just been created, as was our initial intention. We’re going to create a think tank that will try to understand what is causing change in the world, where modernity is going, and what are the wrong paths we should avoid, and the right paths we must choose.

My whole life, I’ve scrutinised the hearts and minds of people and organizations, et we worked for some of the biggest companies and the biggest international organizations, and some governments. We created a permanent system to analyse socio-cultural transformation, and we ended up realizing that were living through a very particular time in the journey humanity, and this is what makes us speak of a metamorphosis.

Homo Sapiens is a socio-cultural animal whose evolution is very quick. In just 100 000 years, from next to nothing, we spread across the globe, having acquired power, considerable power over nature, having started to impact nature, and we ended up realising that we’re heading for catastrophe. The evolution of species, biological evolution is slow. Socio-cultural evolution, on the other hand, is extremely rapid. This is a huge simplification, but for argument’s sake, let’s say there was a long period where we were all hunter-gatherers, and, depending on where we lived, the technologies we discovered, and the changes in climate, we invented new ways to adapt to the environment in which we lived.

For tens of thousands of years, these are hunter gatherer societies. Ten or twelve thousand years ago, there was a global heating , which forced all sociocultures to adapt to a new environment. In 4000 years, in some regions more than others, we transition to a bigger population. It’s no longer a few dozen people, it’s a few hundred, or a few thousand, and we learn to cultivate plant life and to raise and keep livestock. And the population goes up, because women can bear a child every year now. After 4000 years, the vast majority of the population went from hunter-gatherers to village-based civilization, with agriculture and animal husbandry. We invented land ownership, stock ownership, and specialisation. In hunter-gatherer societies, everyone did a bit of everything, but here we started to specialise. Some people start having more power than others, more wealth than others, and we invent hierarchy. Fighting and theft became more widespread, and we steal stocks from each other.

In the regions where agriculture and livestock particularly flourished, most notably in regions adjacent to the great rivers, whether it was the Indus, the Yellow River, the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates, villages became very prosperous. In Sumeria, about 6000 years ago, something other than village-based civilization was emerged: modern civilization. It’s the birth of history. And all the civilizations that appeared at that time have a certain number of things in common. They invent writing, the state, war as a quasi-permanent practice. Humanity developed by creating civilizations that followed this model, and most notably an interesting model, which is the domestication of man by man. Many of these civilizations organised themselves in such a way to ensure that a worker will marry another worker’s daughter, and that they will raise their child to be a worker as well. Most civilizations that developed after the first ones I mentioned earlier (the Nile, Euphrates etc…) would have more or less the same characteristics. Of course, I haven’t mentioned religion, obviously various forms of organized religion are invented, and these are more masculine than the rituals of previous periods.

Of course, we are also a civilization, that is western civilization. Let’s stay focused on “us”, not the whole world. We are western civilization. It’s a civilization like any other. But at the same time, it isn’t like all the others, because it produced the colossal inventions of agriculture and animal husbandry, and these allowed massive population growth, since we’re not far off from 10 billion now. What makes this civilization stand out is, first of all, the transition from the middle ages to the modern era. It’s a civilization that, more than any other before it, is based on rationality. The essence of humanity is rational though. And we invented a rational economy, and we adopted things like Taylorism for example, and a rational political structure, we invented the nation-state. But it’s become apparent that a new metamorphosis began taking place at the very start of the 20th century.

The metamorphosis of THE living organizations – Irene Dupoux-Couturier & Caroline Gerber – EMCC 2018

Mar 29, 2018 | Videos

EMCC France 2018 Symposium – praise for metamorphosis

Following the interview with one of the greatest contemporary French socio-anthropologists, Alain de Vulpian, Irène Dupoux-Couturier and Caroline Gerber discuss the societal metamorphoses of the 20th century, the issues of socio-perception and the increasing role of emotions in our societies.

The Danone Saga – Jerome Tubiana

Feb 21, 2018 | Library

A visionary patron, Antoine Riboud has made BSN and then his son Franck Danone a deeply singular company, a melting pot of multiple reflections or social reforms.
It was in Marseille in 1972 that Antoine Riboud, to the amazement of the employers of the time, gave a quasi-revolutionary speech that attempted to reconcile in the same project the economic and financial constraints of a company and its responsibility towards employees and the community. To move from speech to action, Antoine Riboud sets three priorities:
– Improving working conditions in factories.
– New labour organizations.
– The implementation of social planning in the companies of the BSN group.
He also decided to set up a laboratory for social innovations. In 1974, after the Lip affair that the whole of France followed with emotion and passion, the appointments of Assas were created. This club of exchanges between the bosses and the CFDT has helped to transform the social dialogue.
In 1985, BSN became the first French company to sign framework agreements with an international reach.
In 1987, Jacques Chirac was inspired by the modernization mode d’emploi report…
In 2006, Danone signed a social business company with Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize laureate…
In 2015, the Livelihoods agreement for family farming was signed with Mars to help sustainable agriculture in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Jérôme Tubiana plunges us into this rich and eventful history where friction, conflict and tension have often led to profound metamorphoses.

Foreword by Franck Riboud

The Strange Order of Things – Antonio Damasio

Dec 5, 2017 | Non classé

Antonio Damasio invites us to a radically new and profoundly original reflection on the links between the origins of life, the emergence of the spirit and the construction of culture that Antonio Damasio invites us in this landmark book.
Combining, in a pioneering approach, the achievements of the life sciences and the contribution of the humanities, Antonio Damasio shows that the living carries within him an irrepressible force, homeostasis, which works for the continuation of life and regulates all manifestations, be they biological, psychological and even social.
The Strange Order of Things describes how, in the course of an invisible genealogy, emotions, feelings, the functioning of the mind, but also the most complex forms of culture and social organization, are rooted in the oldest single-celled organisms.
A strong thesis, powerfully argued, which is sure to provoke debate.
A great book that changes our thinking habits and makes us see in an unprecedented light our place in the long chain of life.

Happymorphose Night – Alain Berthoz & Alain de Vulpian

Dec 2, 2017 | Videos

A look back at the evening-dialogue between Alain Berthoz, Professor at the Collège de France and Alain de Vulpian and testimonials from actors of change.
On the occasion of the release of Alain de Vulpian’s new book, Praise of Metamorphosis. On the march towards a new humanity, SoL France gathered last May nearly 200 agents of change and leaders concerned by the ongoing metamorphosis of our civilization.
The consolidation of the Happymorphose network has been announced.

Knowledge, Ignorance, Mystery – Edgar Morin

Dec 1, 2017 | Non classé

"Increasing his knowledge increases his ignorance," Friedrich Schlegel said.

 

"I live more and more with the consciousness and the feeling of the presence of the unknown in the known, of the enigma in the banal, of the mystery in all things and, in particular, of the advances of a new ignorance in every advance of knowledge" says Edgar Morin.

Thus he undertook in this book to patrol the new territories of knowledge, where reveals an inseparable trio: knowledge mystery ignorance.

In his eyes, the mystery does not devalue the knowledge that leads to it. It makes us aware of the occult powers that command and possess us, like Daimon inside and outside of us. But, above all, it stimulates and strengthens the poetic feeling of existence.