Mr. President, we have to tell you, vertical power is a nonsense...

On 20/04/2022 0

In Civic engagement

Emmanuel macron

With the Yellow Vests, you had the intuition that the French aspired to a more participatory democracy. In early 2019, you launched the Grand Débat. Tens of thousands of citizens participated in these forums, debated, invented, dreamed, wrote "Cahiers de doléance". But the mountain gave birth to a mouse, the results faded away... Then you set up the Citizens' Convention on Climate. Participants drawn by lot and freed from influence struggles and lobbies were going to be able to come up with creative and innovative proposals. The Convention presented you with 149 proposals, you rejected three of them and you committed yourself to submit the others "unfiltered" to the Parliament. But the temptation to cherry-pick has been stronger and the disappointment has been great. Why these setbacks and renunciations?

Mr. President, the majority of French people are ready to trust you again, but you need to change your attitude to avoid violent disappointments. 

In "Reinventing organizations", Frédéric Laloux distinguishes five visions of the world and five types of organizations: 

  1. The red vision, that of the brutal leader, guarantor of the social order. The vision of Mr. Putin, in a way, or partially that of your competitor Marine Le Pen. That of the Mafia, of the neighborhood gangs where order must be maintained from above. 
  2. The amber vision (conformist), that of the administrations and religions which are based on a mythology and revealed rules governing good and evil. Guilt and shame are the glue of society and everyone tries to fit in by conforming to what is expected of them and thinking the right way. This is the Chinese system.
  3. The orange vision (the stage of success). This is the vision of the scientific and industrial revolution. The world is seen as a mechanism whose cogs and laws can be studied, understood and manipulated. The one who is faster, more intelligent, more innovative reaps success and profit. Everyone can be what they want to be and succeed at what they set out to do. There are many signs that you share this vision of the world... While knowing its shadows: innovation for innovation's sake, materialistic obsession, money and recognition as the only criteria for success, inequalities, loss of the sense of community, damage to nature...
  4. The Green (pluralist) vision, which inspired the pioneers of the abolition of slavery, women's liberation and religious freedom and which resurfaced as the basis of the counter-culture of the 60s and 70s. While Orange thinking dominates business and politics, the Green vision permeates academic thinking, social workers, and the nonprofit world: autonomy versus hierarchy, value culture, respect for stakeholders. But this organization is difficult on a large scale, which may slow down your attempts at participatory democracy.
  5. We must therefore move towards another vision of the world, the Opal vision, that of the evolutionary stage, which considers the organization as a living organism.

Three advances follow from this:

  • Self-governance, which transforms pyramidal and bureaucratic hierarchies into fluid systems of shared authority and collective intelligence. 
  • Plenitude, where everyone leaves their professional or partisan masks and lives who they are.
  • The evolving awareness of an organization that is in tune with its raison d'être, its own energy, and the opportunities and emergencies it faces. 

Mr. President, you have launched the Great Debate, set up the Citizen's Convention on Climate, dialogued with Corsican elected officials on the hypothesis of regional autonomy, but you are afraid to let go and you deviate from your intuitions, disappointing the citizens and bringing water to the mill of Madame Le Pen. 

Mr. President, forget the ways of thinking the world of the years of your birth, choose the future, the social justice and the participation of the citizens, become the president of a living Republic!

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