My activities on the web
I am currently the editor responsible on the Internet for the following websites:
“Private” website not listed in search engines: www.existentie[dot]info
Not long ago, I was also the webmaster of the site: www.ceinturealimentaire.be
In the past I created two other websites which no longer exist and which presented the Waldorf school in which I worked as well as a psychiatric center that I co-founded with a friend.
My activities, initiatives and background related to the social question, economic questions and social triarticulation
Social economy advisor
Professionally, I am a social enterprise advisor within a social enterprise federation active throughout Wallonia and Brussels. This Federation has no link with social threefolding and even less with anthroposophy. However, on many points, the vision of the economy existing within this Federation is close to certain aspects of social threefolding when they concern the economy and even the place of individual freedom of thought within social life.
As part of my professional work, I support social economy businesses in creation or development, that is to say the reflection and drafting of the social business plan, the drafting of (in-depth) financial plans, drafting statutes of cooperative companies or non-profit associations.
The companies supported can be of any type: they can concern, for example, the production of green energy, food (production, distribution, marketing, etc.), culture (theatre), early childhood, health care, real estate, etc.
I am particularly an expert in “Community Land Trusts” (for the financial aspect) as well as short food circuits and their various sectors (mainly focused on organic food).
It is an incredible opportunity and also very enriching for me to work within a team of colleagues (I would almost say friends) who are really very competent and who demonstrate magnificent human qualities. They do not know anthroposophy, but demonstrate qualities that I have not often found present within anthroposophical circles.
Initiator of an “economic association”
Within this Federation of social enterprises, I was until recently the coordinator of the "Charleroi Métropole Food Belt" ( www.ceinturealimentaire.be ) which is a kind of economic association in the sense that Rudolf understood it. I wrote a brief presentation of this concept, which is central to transforming the economy, on one of the sites I co-created here: https://www.tri-articulation.info/menu-triarticulation/economie-associative/l-economie-associative-un-apercu If necessary, it is possible to use the Google translator integrated on this site, at the top of the page. On this page, I also very shortly outlined the proposal to transform private property (which I develop more in certain videos).
The concept of economic association was very well received by my colleagues (non-anthroposophists) within the Federation. We rather use the word “inter-company intercooperation”, this speaks more to people and what's more, the translation from German to French is not very adequate.
The Charleroi Métropole Food Belt has brought together nearly forty small businesses in an area of 30 municipalities (600,000 inhabitants). The first stages of development, although very demanding, were successful. I have thus accumulated a lot of experience about what to do and, above all, what not to do! Subsequently, our team was no longer able to progress for all sorts of reasons that it would take too long to explain here, although they were also very interesting (these are concrete realities on the ground which prevented advancement to a higher level of development).
Please note: my colleagues within this federation do not know about social threefolding and are not interested in it. This is understandable, because it is EXTREMELY rare for human beings to wish to embrace the social question in all its breadth and complexity, therefore not only the cultural domain, for example, but also legal life and economic life. And within each of these areas, it is also about being able to penetrate them in depth.
For example , it is extremely rare for people to grasp Rudolf Steiner's ideas on the subject of money sufficiently clearly and to be able to then propose practical avenues for the metamorphosis of this system. This also applies to “anthroposophists” who remain, for the most part, confined to their specialized fields of predilection, which is understandable. We cannot understand and control everything!
Furthermore, the social question also requires a sufficiently in-depth study of the human soul itself, and in particular a clear conception of the freedom of the human being. This ultimately leaves very few human beings who have the sufficient maturity even to be interested in and understand Rudolf Steiner's impulses in these vast and complex areas, without grossly distorting them!
Make social threefolding known
In the French-speaking world, social threefolding is almost completely unknown. This is also the case for anthroposophy, which is also slandered every week in the press in France and on social networks by people who are often hateful or simply paid to lie and make propaganda.
Given the relatively "desert" character of anthroposophy in France and French-speaking Belgium (that is to say very, very few people who study it) and also due to the almost absence of publications on the subject of social threefolding and anthroposophy on the Internet (anthroposophists are often old and for the oldest, the Internet has no interest or value, or is something that can only be negative) the younger generations do not have access to this content which also concerns young people.
With a friend we then made the decision to create a website in 2012 to present some basic concepts of social threefolding in French on the web: www.tri-articulation.info
At the same time, another site was created in France by another person (François Germani), who does a very large number of translations of texts or conferences by Rudolf Steiner or other authors in French: www.triarticulation.fr I am from time to time in contact with François as well as with Sylvain Coiplet who is at the base of the site www.dreigliederung.de (in Berlin), perhaps one of the most important sites worldwide for disseminating knowledge relating to threefolding.
Raise awareness of certain concepts inspired by social threefolding using “French-style” formulations
I met a Franco-Swiss economist in 2013 (who is also an educator, he was a teacher in Waldorf schools, etc.) who has been working for more than 40 years on social threefolding, including issues linked to education, democracy, the economy and the monetary system.
He formulates the ideas in a way that can fit particularly well with “the French spirit and culture”, it seems to me. In 2020, I suggested that we make our discussions public. We then began to communicate on ZOOM live with an audience who could ask us all kinds of questions. It was a kind of test. We thus created the website www.civiliens.info on which we have uploaded more than 20 “Civiliens Encounters” videos which present ideas that are totally “out of the box”. They also concern the metamorphosis of the State, of the economy, the decommodification of capital, labor, currency, land and real estate, a metamorphosis also of property rights, etc. These videos are quite long. These are a type of MOOC. At this stage, they are unfortunately still too little viewed. It must be said that these subjects are vast and complex (since it involves formulating some of the concepts of the social threefolding which is particularly vast).
Michel Laloux is notably the author of a very remarkable and important book, also translated into English:
Présentation du livre en français English book presentation
As the risk of a systemic financial and banking crisis on a global scale becomes more and more significant, I have also recently put online around ten short video clips which present anti-bank crash measures. These clips can constitute a first contact with the work of Michel, and the ideas of Rudolf Steiner. See here : https://www.civiliens.info/anti-crash-bancaire
Symptomatology of geopolitical and geostrategic news
We are experiencing global upheaval 33 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I read a lot of articles, often originally from American, Russian, Indian, German, French, Middle Eastern, etc. sites which are then translated on French-language sites. I then copy and paste what seems to me to be the best articles on one of my private sites for my own use and that of a few friends. The site in question is: www.existentiel[dot]info
Old initiatives linked to the social question and triarticulation
In 1992 I was co-founder of the first CSA (Community supported agriculture) in Belgium around a Biodynamic farm. CSAs were originally born from Biodynamic farms and were inspired by the concept of associative economy and social threefolding. A CSA is in some ways an embryonic form of economic association, where there are only two poles: one or more agricultural producers on one side, and consumers on the other (if necessary, for information: https://www.tri-articulation.info/actualite/theme/economie/l-histoire-des-csa-et-son-lien-avec-les-amap )
In 1993, I was co-founder of an association around a Biodynamic farm whose goal was to buy agricultural land to take it out of the commercial circuit (so that it was no longer a commodity). It was one of the very first initiatives of this type in the French-speaking world.
At the beginning of the 1990s I collaborated with a wholesaler of organic products, with the aim of eventually being able to create an economic association. I had to stop this collaboration due to moving.
Make general anthroposophy known
As already mentioned above, there is a huge lack of information regarding anthroposophy on the web in French. In 2012 I created a blog, www.soi-esprit.info which has little by little become one of the French-speaking websites which disseminate the most information on anthroposophy in French, even if it is still VERY modest, in comparison of what exists in English or German.
On this site I favor extracts from Rudolf Steiner's contributions. However, there are also contributions from all kinds of other authors too.
Contributions take several forms: very short articles, articles, videos and podcasts. The aim is to gradually present an overall panorama of anthroposophy and its different areas of application. In a certain sense, I'm still a long way away... but what we currently find on the site is already relatively vast. I'm always looking for ways to better structure it and prevent Internet users from getting lost.
Other actions and initiatives linked to anthroposophy
For 10 years, between 1996 and 2006, I was administrative and financial manager within the first officially recognized Waldorf school in French-speaking Belgium. I was also one of the main people responsible for communication and negotiation with the public authorities. This period proved extremely difficult (it was necessary to take legal action before the Constitutional Court and also before the Court of the Council of State, of even as negotiating with the Government, with a Minister and with Parliamentarians, so as not to see the only school of this type at the time in French-speaking Belgium disappear). The difficulties and trials were so numerous at the time that there would be enough to write a large book.
Between 2006 and 2010, with a social worker friend, we founded a "day center" for people with psychiatric illnesses and people with psychological difficulties. I am in fact a psychologist by training. The center was closed by public authorities in a context of extreme violence towards patients and workers (violent because very suddenly in less than a month), on the basis of a false accusation: being (self-saying) a sect. It must be said that the cultural and intellectual level as well as the human sensitivity of the people who made this decision is extremely low. These people are placed there for political or administrative reasons without any connection with reality. I then worked again as a psychologist in my private consulting practice.
Miscellaneous
Since my youth, even before my encounter with anthroposophy, I have been very regularly in contact with Ministries, State Administrations, ministerial offices, parliamentarians, public institutions (for example, when I was a “kid” aged 22, after co-founding a free radio station, I became the representative of a federation of free citizen radio stations for the Province of Liège to the Ministry).
I was thus able from the inside and on many occasions to observe what is dysfunctional in our political systems and our public institutions… (there are not only dysfunctions either).
When I was still young, I was a researcher at the University... and my first research contract was in Artificial Intelligence... in 1988. I did digital electronics and a lot of programming during my youth. I have a very good idea of how computers work and what profoundly differentiates so-called artificial intelligence from human thought (having worked extensively on the epistemology underlying anthroposophy also during my period of academic research).
In the past I was a member of the anthroposophical society in Belgium, and even vice-president of it (a purely honorary title without any meaning). My role over these few years was limited to ensuring that no sectarian or unbalanced personality became a member of its board of directors 😉.