The State, the Market, the Commons and web3 - Michel Bauwens

I went to the wrong place and then I had to run 20 minutes in the sun. Do you want a chair? No, no, I'm good, I'm good. I'm just wet. Alright, so...

I hope I can get like 35 minutes. Is that okay? Yeah? So, I want to do my presentation in two parts. In the second part I will address the title of the presentation, which is like state, common, civil society, market.

How do they relate and how can they relate today in some kind of new transformation of our society? But before I do that, in the first part, I want to really kind of give you a bit in a nutshell, of course, some kind of macro-historical overview of the evolution of these forms, because I think that's really important. We can't just, like I say, invent anything entirely new if we don't know the logic of why the market and the states were dominant and through different forms in the past. So that's the general idea. And so maybe I'll be bold enough to propose a thesis, which is we went from hunter-gathering, kinship-based, common and gifting-based societies until more or less 5,000 years ago.

That was like the dominant form societies until more or less 5,000 years ago that was like the dominant form to civilizational market states based human organization and so the question that we can ask ourselves are we just continuing that are we just like evolving towards another form of civilization or more civilization or less civilization or actually maybe it's even more radical than that. So I will suggest to think about the hypothesis that what we may be facing is actually more like post-civilization. And I will try to explain why that is by giving a few indications what civilization is about, right? So as far as I understand it, 5,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago, the reason I give that fork is because historians are going backwards now. They find civilization forms before.

So there's a lot of discussion when it actually started. But anyway, so let's take the classical. Until recently, we said 5,000 years ago, when we see very clearly these city-states in Mesopotamia. And so what is different between those new forms as they emerge, you know, out of tribal forms of organization, right? So just to remind you, in a tribal organization it's all about kinship extended kinship with clans eventually up to tribes, federations of clans and tribes but kinship is really what it's about right?

People are with you somehow either share your genes or maybe a common totem or something but it's really based on kinship first, right? And that, of course, is very different once we get into civilization. And a lot of people now are agreeing that civilization was born out of climate change. So we have the desertification of North Africa, the swampification of Mesopotamia, and basically humanity had a choice. We either move out or we actually start mastering nature.

In other words, basically irrigation at first, right? So how can we use the fertility of the Nile, the floodings, and actually manage them so that we can produce more food, etc., etc.? So that's kind of important, I think. There's a relationship with climate, right?

And of course, that's a big debate today as well. We are facing also, in many ways, with changes in the climate. And the second thing may be a bit more controversial, but civilization is about religion. So think about mathematics. You know, was it Gödel?

So I'm not good at math. I'm kind of innumerate actually, but I know a bit about the history of it. And so the basic idea, you can't really... you can't build any mathematics without axioms, right? So you need some...

there's things you can't prove. So in other words, the rational can only be based on the non-rational. Not necessarily the irrational. But you need some agreements about what the world is about, right? So for example, since the 16th century, most people agree that nature is dead.

I mean, it's alive, but matter is dead. You know, it's an object. We can manipulate and extract from that object. That was not the case before. People thought nature was alive, right?

We were animists. We believed in natural deities and all that stuff, right? So civilization is also based on some kind of agreement around some religious foundations, that this is what life is about, this is what we need to do and you might also think about it as so we invent new ways of extraction this can be very harsh and so religion then reacts to that harshness of the extraction and says we need certain ethics so that power can at least have some principles so that they can kind of regulate their behavior. Think about a warrior goes outside, raping and pillaging, want to conquer something. If you do the same in your own land, that's not going to work very well.

So basically, there's this thing called the actual religions where around the sixth century BC, Buddhism, Taoism, the Hebrew prophets, the Greek philosophers, they all kind of emerged at the same time, more or less, a few hundred years before and after and the main theme is like, we need ethics for civilization. We need to impose ethics on power. And then there's some kind of compromise between the warrior class and the spiritual class, and that's really what the civilization order then is about. And lastly, it's, of course, about division of labor, class and caste, so you're no longer family from each other. You're a smith, you're a warrior, you're a slave, you're domestic.

So there is basically a, you know, we could say a coding elite to anticipate what you guys are doing, right? So the invention of writing, the invention of print, all of these things create specific managerial elites. And in a way, very much civilization is about, I know this sounds very Marxist but I guess I have that module somewhere which is basically managerial classes and producing classes and how they relate to each other and the state whether it's an imperial or a kingdom or later the nation state is a way to maintain that order it's a specific specialized institution that maintains these contradictions between these groups that have to live together. So this might be also an interesting insight. So once you have a conqueror and a conquered people, you can't have custom, right?

Because you need to live together, like the Romans with the Germanic invaders. So you can't just continue with custom. You have to actually find these ethical principles that allow the society to function. All right. So we also know that civilizations don't last, all of them.

None of them has survived. So even if we look at China, for example, and of course we can say it's 3,000, 4,000 years old, if not older, but it's not one civilization. If you look more closely, you see more or less 1,000 year cycles interrupted by dark ages. And so the civilization restarts and it takes over certain forms from before, but it's actually a different civilization. There's commonalities, there's differences, but it's very important to know that civilizations have never been eternal, although until now, civilization as such has always survived.

So this is called the central civilization thesis. For example, when the Western Roman Empire collapses, it moves to Byzantium. It's still going on in China. So let's say that the minimal technological basis of civilization has never disappeared as such, but individual civilizations have disappeared all the time. And so that brings me to the role of commons as an institution.

So you have two extractive institutions which are competing, markets and states. They always overuse their resource base, always. There's no exception to that. But there's always some balance in these societies because they have commons. there's always some balance in these societies because they have commons.

And commons are the local forms of self-organization that kind of like preserve natural resources for the local community over the very, very long term. So if you're a medieval farmer in Europe, you have your own little plot of land for your family. You have to work X days a year for the Lord. I think it was 40 days a year. And then you have your commons, which is...

And so I'm using European examples because I know that best, but this exists in every civilization. But the example in Europe would be every year the parish, the population of the parish would go around the village and reconfirm their commons. And that was called beating the bounds, right? Maybe the lord was taking a bit too much common land or the next-door village, and so they would just reaffirm their commons, this is ours, this actually creates our identity. So identity was really vitally related to the commons, local commons, until, let's say, 1600.

And so it's very important to see the commons, local commons, until, let's say, 1600. And so it's very important to see the commons as a kind of counter institution in a way, right? You have the extractive dynamics, which are very necessary for civilization to survive, fight the other ones that want to take over, so it's just the reality that you have these extractive capacities, you know. But equally, if you do that too much, then there's deforestation, there's soil degradation, and that's actually what happens every time despite the commons, but it just takes a lot longer when you have commons to do that, right? Okay.

So that's what I call the pulsation of the commons. So imagine when things go well, market states, you know, function well, they serve their core populations fairly well. Commons are going to weaken. People are going to atomize. They're going to get welfare from the state.

They don't have to self-organize to do that. You know, it becomes like a client relationship. But when these things go bad, like when the peak is over and the decline starts, then of course the people will look to revive their commons because it's a vital necessity to survive, right? Okay. And of course, okay, one more point, dark ages, there's no more market in states, it's only commons, right?

So if you look at history, whether it's China or India or everywhere, the monastic communities are very, very important, especially in these moments of transition. And these are mutualized commons-based forms of organization which basically heal the land when the civilization has collapsed. In Europe, it's very clear. Yeah, here also. We can talk about it has collapsed.

In Europe, it's very clear. Yeah, here also. We can talk about it after. But, you know, to give an example of medieval monks, so the, you know, the Roman elites, they didn't work, right? You had slaves.

And so work, the word for work was the yoke. So slave was a buffalo, basically, right? The Christians said, Ora et labora, work and pray. Work becomes a positive activity. Through your labor, you change the world for the better, right?

And they created communities where you had farmers, craftsmen, people that pray, hermits, administrators, intellectuals copying the manuscripts all living in one community under a common property regime, right? So that's what happens in dark ages not just pirates fighting each other but also these other types of communities One word about transition transition dynamics. So what happens when you reach the point of collapse of a civilization? So first of all, I would say the capacity of integration collapses, right? The trust in the main institutions of that particular form, the narratives of that particular form, the narratives of that particular form, they no longer function.

This can be for two reasons. One reason is there's not enough resources to actually manage that level of complexity. So that's what happened with the Roman Empire. No more slaves, no more gold, no capacity for further conquest. So you need to tax your own people, you need to hire barbarian tribes to do the fighting and when it collapses, it collapses downwards towards the feudal no more cities, no more roads no more ceramics for 500 years in the 15th century, with the collapse of the feudal society in Europe, that's not the way it happens, we actually move upwards the collapse of the feudal society in Europe, that's not the way it happens.

We actually move upwards. We change from the feudal regime to capital state nation, right? We invent this kind of combination of three institutions, and that is because we have print, right? Print allows for more complexity. So at the same time, it destroyed the narrative of the feudal, let's say the Catholic Church, you know, because they time it destroyed the narrative of the feudal let's say the catholic church because they couldn't control the narrative anymore but it created a higher level of complexity so in a sense if we think about internet and networks this is a good thing because maybe this time we actually do have the means for higher complexity right and you should see civilization as a bounding of matter and energy through information.

So a new information regime can change the relationship between matter and energy so that we can get more out of it at a high level of complexity, right? So here's a thesis, a bit maybe abrupt already, but what if we can actually say that actually what is happening now is a shift from civilization based on markets and states as the dominant institutions to peer-to-peer coordination with commons. So I think personally that the new organizational form is organized networks with commons that has transcend and include. It's a meta-container that can actually work with markets. It can work with public authorities.

It can work with NGOs, voluntary contributions. It can work with permissionless contributions, which is the thing that's invented with peer production and free software. It can do all these things at a higher level of integration. So that's the promise. The promise is that we can actually achieve a higher level of complexity with more coordination, more complexity, but that will require new institutions, new ways of doing things.

And one of the ways of thinking about this is thinking in terms of functional equivalence. Meaning, we can't just say abolish the state. I mean, if you want to know how that works, you can go to, let's say, Somalia or something and see if that's a good way to do it. But you have to think about, can we do better, right? Can we have a functional equivalence to something that the state or corporations are doing that can be done better through organized networks and their comments?

So that's the kind of general idea, I think. So, okay, transition dynamics. Collapse, disintegration. Disintegration creates fragmentation. We explode in a million groups.

To be honest, my big frustration with Web3 is that I could spend three days per day just following my Telegram groups to know what's happening with you guys. It drives me crazy. Fragmentation galore. I don't think that's, the end not the solution either. You know, either toxic general social media or fragmented cozy web, there must be something in between that is a bit more efficient, I think.

But anyway, so fragmentation leads to polarization. That's kind of a weird side effect, but it always happens. The pagans against the Christians, the Reformation against the Catholics, the culture war today, the Taoists against the Confucianists, whatever, right? So this has happened many, many, many times in history. Fragmentation, polarization.

The thing is that the solution is often not found in that struggle, right? The solution is often found in a new synthesis. So maybe not your favorite person, but St. Paul, just to give an example, you had the Zealots who wanted to destroy the Roman Empire, and you had the Herodians who wanted to make a deal with the Roman Empire, both of them disappeared. What came out of it was a new synthesis, somebody who in some way kind of mixed both and created something new out of it, right?

So again, so the solution... So I often talk about East-West digital to explain that. So there's a 5,000-year competition between the East Asian, East Eurasian systems, Russia, China, basically today, right? State-centric, harmony-based, keeping the market very regulated and controlled by the state. The state is everything.

You can't be an oligarch if the state doesn't agree with you. Just as opposite in the US everything you can't be an oligarch if the state doesn't agree with you, just as opposite in the US, you can't be a president without the support of the oligarchy right, so continental state centric versus market centric, democratic conflict oriented so these two forces have contended for supremacy for 5000 years and they're still doing, they're still at it right and of course this represents the two extractive institutions that are fighting it out for hegemony so maybe we I say we in a very loose way because I know we're very plural and diverse but maybe we are a third force, right? So we stand for something different, which is translocal self-organization, right? And that's new today. That's the equivalent of the print in the 15th century.

So we, in a way, you can think about this in this way, right? We have writing creates a writing elite. Printing creates a merchant elite with accounting. And here is a coding elite, more or less, right? And so why do we have capitalism as a dominant form?

Because in the 15th century, and this was only the case in Europe, we didn't have an empire. And so within the three cities of the Middle Ages, the merchants became dominant and slowly created the world to their image, aligning with the king and changing eventually all the rules. I would suggest that what you are doing is very similar. You're a coding elite, you are translocal, you own your means of production, your computers, but you don't own the means of valorization. And so you're trying to create a world in which the value that you create is under more under your own control of your own networks.

More or less I would say that is what is trying to be done. Okay, fragmentation, polarization, seed forms, right? So you have exit. If the old system doesn't work, you have exit. What happens with exit first is people with anticipatory consciousness.

People say this is not working, it's going to get worse, we need to find other solutions. So you leave the system, usually at great cost, pioneers, and you try things out, like, this is not working, we need to be more resilient, we need more healthy food, we need to find another way to get housing, you know, all these issues that young people today would be facing, and you basically create seed forms, you basically create seed forms. You work on seed forms. Eventually, some of them get successful, get combined in subsystems. And then the second way of the exit is when, of course, the majority of people can no longer live in the old system.

It's no longer working. And Rome went from a million to 80,000 people in like 50 years or something, right? So where do they go? Well, you know, they went to the monasteries or to warlords who could protect them, right? So they went to the existing seed forms, the feudal seed forms that have been created over the years to escape the failing system of the polis, the city-based system of Rome.

So seed farms are very, very important. And of course, I would argue the seed farms today are commons-based and peer-to-peer. If you look at what is common to all these projects, most of the time, those two things are there, as opposed to the old system where they're not there. Right? So this is very important.

If you don't want to be too utopian, you have to look at seed forms. What are people actually doing? Not just what you want to happen, but what are people actually doing that are leaving the system? And what is working, what is not working, what is consolidating? You know, these are the questions that are of interest and so every change is a change of value regime almost every 500 years we have fundamental changes in value regime I indicated about how the Christians thought differently about labor so I would think that what we are doing is a shift largely from commodity-based labor to contributory labor.

Right? We want to follow our passions. We want to free associate our passions and skills. And then we want to make a living out of it. Right?

We just don't want to sell our labor power for mindless, you know, subordinate systems where we don't want to sell our labor power for mindless, subordinate systems where we don't find meaning. So we are actively changing the value regime of the society we live in by creating common centric, contribution based, pre-production ecosystems. And let me briefly say, and then I'll switch to the theme, which is the role of accounting. It's super important. So the first ledger is found in Sumer.

It's a temple, and there's grain coming in and out. And so that indicates the birth of the state, the temple state, originally. In the 14th century, what's his name? Lucia Pacioli, I think, a Franciscan monk, invents double entry book accounting. So suddenly the corporations, merchant guilds, they have a way to see, oh, I'm getting richer or poorer, right?

Profit, capital, I can see it grow or go down. But notice what they don't see. They don't see any impact. They don't see any externalities, right? So we create a system of blind corporations, right?

That only look for their own benefits first, profit. And then we have states who look out for their people, ideally. But they also don't care about anything else. There's no responsibility of states for the planet. It doesn't exist.

So we have a system that really systematically excludes externalities. Until now. But now notice what happens with the blockchain so for the first time in history we have a universal ledger for the first time in history we can join an open ecosystem and we have to do accounting in 3D with that ecosystem right? so we have to do accounting in 3D with that ecosystem, right? So we have contributory accounting, like public goods or reattractive funding of public goods.

That's contributory accounting. Take into account contributions that are not purely market-based, but that need to happen anyway, and we find ways to fund it. We have flow accounting. One of them is called resources events agents. It's getting more popular.

So every transaction is in 3D. Your place in the network. No double entry. And then we have thermodynamic accounting, which is basically not just seeing the money flow, but seeing matter and energy flowing, right? So that you can make context-based decisions taking into account sustainability factors.

So these three elements of the universal ledger or the planetary ledger as the region foundation calls it, right, is a way that finally we can see impact. We can create a system that takes we can see impact. We can create a system that takes into account externalities. So you can see that all these things are already pointing to something different than what we had before, right? Okay, so what is the problem today?

So within this nation-state form, until maybe 1980s, this is from Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, we had a Lib Lab cycle. So a new industrial system is born, a combination of new technology, new energy, new management systems, starts working very well, high growth rate, that's good for labor, so welfare reforms, new institutions, etc., etc. Then you have a peak crisis, 1973, 1980. Capital is not happy.

They can't make enough profit. So there's a change to the lip face, right? Lower growth, good if you have money, but it ends with a demand crisis. So we have supply crisis in the middle and a demand crisis at the end. So this happened in 1873, 1929, 2008.

So every 30 years we had a shift, a mini shift between the relation with market and state. Regulating, deregulating, regulating, deregulating. And this no longer functions. Because now we have transnational finance, and there's nothing you can do within the nation states to actually change these fundamental issues, right? That's why people don't believe in politics.

Because it doesn't seem to matter. That's not where the power is so what's the solution to this? well one of the solutions and this is where I come in with cosmolocalism is that we can create next to the transnational finance and next to the interstate system we can create translocal coordinations or network nations, right? So in other words, we build power translocally to the level where we can actually challenge transfinancial power and can even negotiate with states, actually, right? So that's kind of the idea, I think.

And, you know, I'm also critical of Balaji in the sense that I see too much as a corporate state model. But, you know, there is something very valuable there, which is that if people can, you know, can imagine doing this, that means we're already pretty far in that transition, right? We can already imagine actually creating trans-local institutions. All right. So what can we say about the state?

I would argue that the state will not disappear completely because we have territories and we have to manage territories with very different people living together. You know, we have to solve these with very different people living together. We have to solve these issues. That doesn't disappear. Does it have to be a nation state?

Probably not. But I tend to think in terms of partner state. So the welfare state model is you make money through extraction, you make a profit, you tax the profit, and then you redistribute through the state. It assumes that value is only created through extraction. So if a big oil tanker collapses in the sea, that's really good for GDP.

If 10,000 people clean the beach, it brings GDP down, right? There's something fundamentally wrong about a system that believes that. And that's because they don't recognize contributory labor. So that's essential, is that a partner state recognizes that kind of labor, right? One of my ideas about this is public ledgers institutions, real-time public ledger organizations.

So I'll give you an example. This is the Community Land Trust in France, Terre des Liens. They have a proven effect on the depollution costs of the French state, €350 million that the state doesn't have to spend to clean the water. They can't get anything of that money. And the problem, of course, today is that land is so expensive that young people who want to do eco-farming, they just can't do it.

So community land trust buys the land from the market, turns it into a trust, and then gives you cheaper access to the organic farming. But they could very well then say, well, if we save you $350 million a year, give us 25%, and we create a virtuous feedback loop. So this is looking for actualizing contributory value, something that is not happening in the current system. And I think Web3 is actually doing that. So if you think about, you know, like, optimism, self-taxing itself to fund Gitcoin public goods, that's recognizing contributory labor, right?

You recognize that there's a collective action problem that individually you don't want to fund because, you know because I don't want to pay for everyone. So you find a solution and that's funding public goods. And these are non-market goods. And you do it without the state. So that's kind of a fundamental advance as well.

So I think the state can have a vision that it becomes a facilitator, a mediator. But I think actually the key today is bioregionalism, right? The state is a historical and cultural entity that has grown over hundreds of years to be what it was, but it's grown away from nature. So if we are in a kind of situation where we fluctuate, climate crisis, floodings, resource So that's where I think actually commons-based institutions have to play a much bigger role. So what is cosmolocalism?

It's everything that's heavy is local and everything that's light is global and shared. So it's a combination of relocalized production, organized on a bioregional basis, eventually facilitated by your nation state, but at the same time you build up translocal knowledge, commons, protocols of cooperation, ways to finance transnationally regenerative activities, et cetera, et etc., right? So that's kind of, and so why is cosmolocalism so important? Because we spend two times as much on transport than on making.

And then mutualization, you know, think, I mean, the famous example is the Black and Decker drill, which is used eight minutes in a lifetime. It makes a lot of sense to say, okay, let's have a tool library, you know, in a lifetime, makes a lot of sense to say, okay, let's have a tool library, you know, in a village, right? So mutualization is going to be really key in this ecological transformation. I would also say that... So if you look at resilience versus efficiency, right?

This is from Bernard Lietard, a Belgian monetary theorist, a really good book called The Mysteries of Money. So if you become more efficient, which is what we started doing very much at the 16th century, in the beginning that's good for resilience. And but there is a point where more efficiency leads to less resilience. Typically neoliberal supply chains, there's no fat anywhere. Anything happens anywhere in the supply chain, the whole supply chain collapses.

And so the big argument is also post-civilization in my eyes, is we need to shift towards resilience. We need to grow, but we need to grow resilience. Which means if you have land, you probably need one crop that's good for drought, one crop that can resist storms, and a crop that can make profit. But if you only have one crop and something happens, you're dead, right? So this is another shift, I think, that we need to think about.

OK, and so the commons is that institution which does that. Historically, the commons are the conservative institution. You can take a picture by satellite of the world. Where is it green? Where they have commons.

Japan, Austria, Switzerland, where the mountains are protected as commons. That's green. And despite liberalism, I can tell you where the land are protected as commons that's green and despite liberalism I can tell you where the land is privately owned, it's not green you know it's not and so we need to scale the commons translocally, right? we need to find commons-based institutions so this is why I think we need a commons-centric post-civilization or civilization because it's not think we need a common centric post-civilization or civilization because it's not that we need to abolish market and state mechanisms they are good for certain things but they have to operate within some kind of mechanism that can basically avoid the overuse. And the difference of of course, between all civilizations and capitalism is that civilizations only exhausted their own territory and global capitalism exhausts every territory.

So there's no way to go. And that's why we can't just be local either. And I want to give the argument from Geoffrey West, and maybe end with that. He makes this difference between sublinear and superlinear relationships. A baby, body and brain, you double the size of a baby, the brain only grows by 85%.

It's sublinear because you lose efficiency through scaling. But a city is super linear. You double a city because of the network effects of the relationships, you get more than double the innovation if you double the population of a city. And now I'm asking you, and maybe I'll end with this, what are you doing here? And now I'm asking you, and maybe I'll end with this, what are you doing here?

I think you're building civium, the post-civilization format. You're emulating the city in a translocal way. That's exactly what is happening here, right? Twelve pop-up villages, extraordinary amount of collective learning, building a collective culture, and there's no city right so that's kind of also I think post-civilizational is that I think the relationship between the rural and the city might change and there will be some kind of territorial reorganization you know we don't exactly know how all these things will work but I think this is a pretty good, you know, way of thinking about this. Okay, I'll probably stop here.

And if you have any questions, I don't know how long I talked. Five minutes of questions. Sorry, yeah, I tend to really always overuse my time, de questions, désolé, je tente de vraiment toujours d'utiliser mon temps, et puis je dis toujours je conclue, je conclue et je double mon temps de lecture en faisant ça ok, allez-y wrote essentially the deconstruction of religion, which led to the world of the long road, but it was part of this process. And where does that get into most of the people here, France locally or... Right, right, right.

Well, I'll mention my favorite author, Kojin Karatani, Karatani Kojin in Japan. The structure of world history. So he says, mode A, gifting and commoning. Mode B, the state. Mode C, the market.

And mode D is the perpetual attempt of humanity to recreate mode A on a higher level of complexity. Right? So first, that was done by the world religions. All the world religions are originally popular movements they are born in the decline of empire when people want to create new values and self organize around these values and then eventually of course as they grow they become themselves the new civilization there's some kind of you know adaptation and corruption that happens and maybe themselves the new civilization. There's some kind of adaptation and corruption that happens and maybe 10% of what they wanted gets done, but it does get done in the higher level civilization that comes after.

So that stopped functioning in the West in the 16th century, more or less. So what happened then is basically what we did is we collapsed the vertical into or less. So what happened then is, basically what we did is we collapsed the vertical into the horizontal. So the utopia is not into a relationship with the divine, into some particular mechanism. No, no, it's going to be better in the future.

So Marxism, fascism, anarchism, liberalism, they're secular attempts. But you can feel it. They have, all of them have a messianic element, right? So that's what religion has become in the second stage. And now I get into hot waters because somebody got very angry on X with me when I said that.

But I think Web3 is a community of faith. It's the third iteration. Right? That doesn't mean you all believe in the same God. No.

It means you all believe in decentralization. And when you lose two-thirds of the valuation of Bitcoin, you're still here. Because faith moves mountains. It's a secular faith. It has a messianic element, more or less, you know, depending on who is here.

You know, there's crazy people amongst us, right, who believe we'll live forever in the next 10 years. Maybe they're right, who knows? But, you know, so the messianic element is there. So I think it's a vehicle. And then I made a very bad joke.

I said, we are POCs, people of crypto. That also made some people angry. So anyway, yeah. So yeah, so I think I forgot what I was answering. So I think, let me just finish this I think we are attempting to create a higher level integrative philosophy that has spiritual basis that may not just be going back to traditional religions but so John Vervaeke Graham Dempsey you know, metamodernism, I see this all as trying to find this particular thing that we need, which is a new mixture between the spiritual and the rational.

Because, you know, can we be fully spiritual and fully scientific at the same time? But the thing is, if you don't have that spiritual basis, you don't have rationality. You're going to turn around in crazy ways, which is, I think, exactly what's happening in the West right now. It's becoming unhinged, because we had religion, then we had post-religion, and now we have no religion. And I think these people are becoming insane.

That's my very modest point of view. But please golles. C'est mon point de vue. Mais s'il vous plaît, allez-y. Vous et vous.