Etienne Chouard. — Part IV (Lyon Conference) Mars 2012 - "Is Democracy a trap ? " Roots of our political impotency.

PART I : Achievements since 2005.
An original project. — The Anti-Constitutional European Treaty — Twelve Thousand Mails Under the Sea — To be against and to build. — Role of Constitutions. — Of contradiction. — Collaborative tools of the plan C : the forum, the wiki, the blog.

Etienne Chouard, independant researcher.
Conference in Lyon, on March 9th 2012. MJC St Just.
"Is Democracy a trap, an illusion ?"

Cadre & montage : Matthieu Wadoux — [e-mail]
English translation : Dorian Faucon - [e-mail]

We are two "MJC" (NT: an organism which promotes culture among young people) to welcome you tonight: the Saint-Just MJC, where you currently are

and the Ménival MJC. We worked together on some debates because this is an important year

politically speaking, as you know, and one of our calling

is to work on this, especially with young people,

and try to initiate them... So we organize citizen debates.

So there is a first debate tonight. We wanted to shake things up.

It is, I think, the purpose of MJC's, to compel people

to think out of the box; a place that tries to bring new ideas,

Our funders don't really like it but we don't care.

I won't say more. Just know that we really enjoy debates here,

more and more, and I have said to many: "you are glad to be here,

but if you want to help prepare other debates,

you are welcome. Have a good night !" - Thanks

Hi ! Good evening to all of you.

So I... You must know that... I'm currently on a pioneering work about the mess we are in

and I feel like I have found, working with you,

it is a collective work,

some kind of antidote to olligarchy... and I would like to

present it to you, but not too long

in order to leave room for your objections, because this is then

that we progress the most. The inconvenient

is that when someone join the project without knowing anything about it

there will be a lack of informations,
but there's more and more stuff

on the web, a lot of videos and texts

to come again and rework it.

Anyway, the topic is democracy...
true democracy

It requires everyone to work.

It is not enough to listen some guy only once

with ideas... "well, well, interesting."

The idea, to make things work well,
is that we appropriate

the subjects I will talk to you about tonight,
and to do so

I think it requires work, that is to say

read a little, and try by yourselves

to explain to others, and when you're gonna
explain to others,

they will have objections,

and at first objections will unseat you;

and then, you have to work,
and you will become...

I was gonna say invulnerable,
not exactly, but...

You will see that the objections
- I will tell you which in a moment -

I don't think it resist analysis

But maybe tonight you will find
new objections

and put me in trouble.

So, maybe two words to present myself.
I am a teacher in Marseille, France.

Six years ago, back in 2004-2005,
I was still an elector,

a simple elector, asleep, passive,

unworried. I voted. I saw
it wasn't changing anything,

but it didn't bother me, I was minding
my small business, like everybody.

And in 2005, on the occasion of a debate
about a referendum,

you have to remember this, the debate about
the european anti-constitution...

Don't forget to say "anti-constitution",

because they called it constitution

but in fact european treaties are meant to destroy

constitutions. They don't do what they were created for.
We're gonna talk about it later,

I'm gonna elaborate a bit; there isn't enough
time tonight

to talk about european institutions; it is another matter...

It would require an entire evening,
so I will just raise it.

Anyway, it is on this occasion that I woke up
in 2005

I realized it was something very dangerous.

"What is this thing ?!". And on the occasion of the debates,
something extraordinary happened to me.

I wrote a text, put it online,

a lot of people were doing it.

The text started to circulate, more and more,

and I ended up receiving hundred of mails per day,

very moving, touching,
enthusiastic mails,

very happy mails, those who wrote it
were happy

to have found, at last,
a clear way of saying

what they couldn't formulate;

really a lot of happy,
very enthusiastic mails,

that gave me a lot of energy.

And then hundreds a day, for two months
I received 12000 mails !

A lot more than I could handle,

but I spent entire nights to answer
to these people.

And among them there were people who
didn't like me at all,

who thought i was an impostor, a liar...

Some said I was a "trotskist submarin",
some said

"a far right submarin",
well, a submarin, right.

But these people were hurting me,
because I was just like everybody,

I wasn't armed for that,

it just happened. And I tell you about this

because later, when we will talk about
intitutions

you will see the athenians used
what has allowed me to improve.

What has made me change is the look
of others upon me

the benevolent look of others
that was saying:

"Yes ! Keep up like that !"
Humans are sensitive to that

- and me too obviously - and the suspicious,
malicious look

of others, it motivates too, it's like
the carrot and the stick.

"Why does he say I'm a liar, an impostor,

why does he say I know nothing,
I will prove him wrong."

And this is a motivation too.

So with both motivations, I have started
to work like a madman,

and six years later I still haven't stopped.
So I have started reading a lot.

So about what intellectual mechanism, to what avail ?

I started with with one finding and I'll try to pick up

the logical thread that led to my conclusions

to see if you end up on the same conclusions. So that you might be able to tell me:

"Hang on, there's something here that's not making sense, that doesn't fit in correctly..."

I'm counting on you to stop me if you feel that I'm saying something foolish or just wrong.

Feel free to interrupt, by all means. It will be slightly more disorderly

but it'll be more alive. If you need to stop me, it doesn't bother me.

So I started with... At the end of the debate on the treaty (NT: establishing a Constitution for Europe), we voted No

on May 29th 2005, a date we should remember.

It's an important moment where we succeded in saying "No" in France,

when all the media, the newspapers, the TV show were pushing us to say "Yes",

or we'd be xenophobic, racists and so on.

We were... At least all the people who were saying "No" were ill treated by the media.

And despite that, we succeded in saying "No" because we actually talked a lot about it between us

and in the details (NT: of the treaty), there were real and solid reasons to say "No".

And so we, French, say "No" and comes the summer. Shall we work on something else? What do we do?

What people wrote to me drove me to carry on.

To carry on, because we had said "No", we had opposed the treaty,

and that it's easier to be an opposition than to actually build something.

And so I started imagining... If it doesn't seem right,

if that Constitution wasn't good, and I could well see that the Constitution of 1958,

ours, of the 5th French Republic, was almost as bad.

"As bad", I can say that, the french canadians use it...

The Constitution of 1958 is almost as horrible

than the European Constitution, just slightly less.

So if these Constitutions are so wrong... I asked myself the following question:

"Why was it written so badly?" And so my text

that had been read by many, in my fifth argument, I came to this important conclusion:

I beleive that if this European text was so bad

it's because those writting it should never have written it.

I think that if the European Institutions are so bad

it's because the people who wrote them were ministers (NT: Secretaries of State)

and that those ministers, we'll bring it up later on,

when they are writing a Constitution,

they are writing the rules that they should be fearing.

Because the role of a Constitution is to weaken the influence of Power.

It's to put fear in those who have Power. A Constitution is used to protect us

against abuse of power. I have practiced law so that's what I learned in law school.

Well...leanred... In truth, we don't exactly learn that in law.

We learn that a Constitution serves the purpose of organising powers,

to seperate powers, to protect. OK. We talk a bit about it,

but we don't linger on the subject. We have many things to see

in Constitutional Law and in my opinion, we don't talk about this enough.

We should learn in kindergarten, then in primary school,

bash it in us, then in middle school and in high school,

and then our whole life, we should learn this essential point,

which is probably one of the most important mechanisms

of what I will tell you tonight:

"What is, really, a Constitution? What is its' purpose?"

A Constitution is a superior text. We are at the bottom,

we are base level citizens, the atoms of the social body,

and we need to be able to organise ourselves, to pacify us,

to not fight amongst one another, we need

written rules that let us solve disputes

and that give us a reason not to fight. These rules are written

by people that we place above us, a lawmaker for example,

or the executive who will execute laws with the help of police, armed forces,

judges. So these powers that are going to apply this law,

so these common rules, who pacify us, the people who produce or

who apply this law; we accept, we, at the bottom,

we accept to have them above us, because it pacifies us.

OK. Everyone gets it, I won't go further.

The fact is, through law, we are less brutal.

But the powers who will be... Alright, we are millions, but even if wh'n we're just thousands,

or tens' of thousands, we cannot writ law ourselves.

We're just too many. So we need to delegate to some people the job to write this law.

So we need representatives to help us build,

and to set in place the law to which we will submit.

But these actors who are going to producte this law,

they are at the same time very useful, but also very dangerous.

If they respect the greater good (common interest), all is well.

But if they don't respect the greater good,

if they start to pursue personal gain, or the interest of a group,

of a cast, of a social class, or a party of citizens,

at that moment, all citizens are in danger of being abused by power.

So this we know from start. Eve in Athens, at the time, they had a Constitution.

The Constitution is a text that is above people,

above these (political) actors, above parlement, above government,

above judges but it must also be above media,

of banks... All those who have power.

Above that, we put a superior text called the Constitution,

which isn't a dusty old text

which we don't care about. It's a central text that we should know by heart,

that we should defend. We should know

all the mechanisms of the Constitution to know what it's this is used for, what that is used for,

this part is a good one, that one doesn't look good but in truth

it's to balance that other one. We should know the mechanism

- which shouldn't be too complicated because it needs to be in the reach of

all to grasp - we should know the mechanism

of a Constitution because it is above people who are in power

to protect us, to protect, us, of abuse of power.

Do you get it ? It's really important.

The Constitution shouldn't be a formality. Not at all, really.

So, I had this in mind. I knew what a Constitution was for,

and I had argued against for two, three months,

against this European Constitution that wasn't doing its' job.

It doesn't protect us and it doesn't protect us because it was written by people

who have are interested in our impotency.

So that was about the time that I started to tell myself:

"Right, what do we put instead of this one ? What should be in an actual good Constitution ?"

So I wrote a text, that was a starting point of a whole serie,

I wrote a text that was called "The great principles of a good Constitution".

So I worked on it for the whole summer, a few months,

and I published it. But that's when I noticed I didn't have the interaction anymore

with all those people I had during those 2-3 months.

I discovered during those first 2-3 months of interaction, of referendum debate,

that we never move forward as well as during a contradicting debate.

When we are between us... Tonight, there's a good chance that

we'll agree. So we probably won't progress as much as

if we had amongst us people who don't agree at all!

Even people we really don't like at all.

So it's less pleasant. Here, it'll be pleasant if we all agree,

but we must understand that we'll progress less.

I'd even go as far as to say that we'll enclose ourselves in misleading directions without realising

that it is a wrong direction, because we didn't have the conflincting arguments.

That is putting in the correct light all the ins

and outs of a subject, which is precisely

what a real democracy tries to set up. We'll talk about it later on.

So I missed having that interaction so, in january 2006, I create my website.

It's really my work tool... I don't write books,

but I have enormously written with you, I have quite a lot

on that website. So it has become interactive in 2006

with a forum to have discussion, argument by argument, of this text:

"The great principles of a good Democracy".

So I put: "The blank ballot must be respected."

So "The blank ballot must be respected," it's a starting point for a discussion with you.

I say "you" in the generical sens, with the others.

And so it's a starting point of the conversation and there was

hundreds of pages on the blank ballot, very detailled

explaining why we need the blank ballot,

and how we would make it work if we were the ones writing the Constitution,

what would we write for articles? So we had about 20 items,

20 points that were grand principles that were in my document.

But after that, it was "open" because you could, you still can,

create new discussions, new threads of comments on the institutions.

So, for example, in 2006, quite rapidly

came André-Jacques Holbecq who became a friend

and who created a thread on the forum: "In the Constitution,

we should take back the power over money." (NT: creation of money)

It became one of the main threads. There must around 200 discussion threads on the forum.

It's quite a large object but you must take it thread by thread and...

Alright, it's a lot of work to keep us busy, but it's exciting.

On every thread, we talk about the things that concern you.

We talk about our concerns. We talk about things that interest us a lot more than soccer

or rugby. I mean...

... that are much more able to change our life,

in a comfortable and mutual respectful sens, by taking pleasure in taking care of common affairs

rather than imposed subjects that hear about in the medias.

So it's large, but it's interesting.

On this forum, we have conversation themes

where we discuss directly the aspects of the Constitution.

And in a second part, we have a "Wiki".

It's another technology, the Wiki, you can all write on it,

and it's a part reserved to the Constitution. The difference is that here we have articles.

It's a place where we can really write the Constitution.

We write those articles. So first, we debate on the forum,

point by point, and when we're sure: "There, we've done it,

we understood what we want in a citizen initiated referendum,

we understood what we want on judges' responsability,

we understood what we want on seperation of power,

we understood what we want on journalists: what are we going to do for journalists

what do we plan in the Constitution concerning journalists."

On the forum, we set down what we wanted and then on the Wiki

we write the articles. So there's a common base,

there is a shared Constitution on the Wiki that is the result

of almost all that we've said. It's a synthesis.

And then, there are parts where you can create your own page.

When you create an account on the Wiki, you can write your own page.

At start with just a couple articles, but these articles

that seem the most important for you and then it grows

as you add your elements. When you signal to me that it's has become something

where you are in need for confrontation

with the opinion of others to progress, I add a link to your page

on the left hand menu. You'll see in the menu on the left

that there are some Constitutions of guys who have put a lot of effort

to think on projects that are sincerly interesting.

The forum and the Wiki are interactive objects. Start to think on it.

And then there is a third part which is a blog.

This is a technology you probably already know about

since there are many on Internet. This blog is dedicated to everything that is related to the subject

but isn't really in the Constitution directly but that is linked. For example: Economy.

There are many important things, many important subjects on economy,

in philosophy, in sociology, in history. So points that aren't specificly institutional,

but still very interesting to understand reality,

powers in place and abuse of power. Concerning power and abuse of power,

I talk about it on the blog, for example. So, the history of power, the history of abuse of power,

of resistance against abuse of power and all that goes inside the blog. So to be short!

Actually...I keep saying that I'll be brief but I'm just incapable of keeping it short...

I need to go quicker. I have built this tool that let's us, together,

think correctly about what should go in the Constitution,

what are the weaknesses of the current Constitutions.

It's not all about saying:

"The Constitution is bad, we want a good one". Here, we're writing it !