This book marks a turning point in the history of philosophy, namely the transition from a vision of man based on introspection, and therefore simply plausible, to a vision based on scientific approach, and the construction of a social model accordingly.
In the 19th century, Karl Marx noted that the fantastic gain in productivity resulting from industrialization did not benefit everyone, on the contrary. In his book Le Capital, he describes very precisely the social mechanics leading to this morally revolting situation. Noting that the leaders and beneficiaries are the bourgeois class, and capitalist accumulation, communism advocates its overthrow. Alas, the remedy turned out to be worse than the disease.
However, it was not until the second half of the 20th century that sociology discovered the two root causes that explain what Marx observed. Moreover, before this book, they were not identified as THE source of social violence and progress that does not benefit everyone. The first of these causes is social ambition, which translates into generalized nepotism, that is to say a permanent violence of the type us against them, simply contained, when all goes well, by social conventions. Furthermore, the fact that the chief is nice or aggressive does not change the case. The second is cognitive dissonance, which comes to put an end to the belief, widespread from Marc Aurèle to Descartes and Kant, that the one who does evil is aware of it.
The concrete translation of these two cumulative effects is the virtual impossibility, in the current social system, of making good collective decisions, that is to say of making progress benefit to all. Indeed, a good decision supposes to combine four qualities, which are 1. sufficient competence, 2. sufficient quantity of work, 3. impartiality, and finally 4. not lying to oneself. Poorly framed social ambition makes the third impossible, and ignored cognitive dissonance makes the fourth impossible. In our technologically complex society, voting as a means of decision very often combines the four faults, and thus sanctifies ineptitude. This shows us that in the end, the philosophy of the Enlightenment, and its embodiment of social democracy, is just as illusory as communism.
The system proposed to replace capitalism is the establishment of a social organization which ensures quality decisions, while assuming the limits of human rationality that we have just described, where the usual incantation consists in calling for a moral outburst, that is, to deny cognitive dissonance. For this, we introduce the concept of strategic rating which aims to empirically establish the capacity of each individual to make quality decisions, as well as two new formalisms imposed on production organizations, in addition to current accounting, which are the problems log and the strategic thinking m. The problems log ensures an internal dialogue highlighting know-how as opposed to social ambition. The strategic thinking log oversees the development of quality decisions. The core of the functioning of the media and of justice are reviewed accordingly. Finally, the size of production organizations is severely limited, and their funding no longer calls for the concept of market.
In addition to the decline in social tensions, the second expected benefit of the new system is the ability to finally exit the growth imperative. Indeed, this imperative resulted from Parkinson's law, a product of poor regulation of social ambition.
PS: I'm currently (summer 2020) translating the all book from french to english. The problem for me is that as a non native english speaker, I have trouble to decide in the end if a given wording sounds natural or is unecessarely hard to read because strange. So, if you are a native english speaker and ready to point me out bad wording sentences, please drop me an email to hubert.tonneau at fullpliant.org. Also, you don't need to understand french to do that because my translation is basically correct on the meaning side.