We live in a society fascinated by individual transformation. Behavioural therapies, awareness campaigns, nudges, self-improvement, injunctions to "change our habits": everything seems to suggest that the ecological, social and economic transition depends above all on our ability to become better citizens, better consumers or better leaders.
Yet despite decades of discourse and pedagogical effort, collective behaviours evolve slowly, fragile and often reversible.
This paradox deserves to be stated clearly: we spend our time trying to change individuals, while most often refusing to change the rules that manufacture their behaviour.
What institutionalists understood long ago
This intuition is not new.
Karl Polanyi showed that markets are not natural realities emerging spontaneously from human psychology. They are institutional constructions, made possible by laws, conventions, property rights, monetary rules and political choices. Changing these rules means changing the very operation of the market.
Douglas North, Nobel laureate in economics, defined institutions as the "rules of the game" that structure human interactions. Their function is to reduce uncertainty — but above all to determine which behaviours are rewarded and which are discouraged. Individuals respond less to abstract moral principles than to the incentive structures within which they operate.
Pierre Bourdieu, from a different angle, argued that our habitus — that way of perceiving the world and acting that feels natural to us — is largely the product of the social structures we have internalised. What we sometimes call personality is often nothing more than the lasting imprint left by the institutions in which we grew up.
The formula may seem provocative, but it perfectly captures this dynamic: it is men who create institutions. Then institutions create men.
Three examples to move beyond abstraction
Take a classroom. Without explicit rules, noise rises quickly, interactions become chaotic and everyone follows immediate impulses. Introduce a clear framework, protocols for speaking and an organised space, and the same children instantly adopt very different behaviours. Their nature has not changed. Only the rules have.
Consider a road junction. For years, authorities multiplied prevention campaigns and reminders about caution. Accidents persisted. Then came the roundabout. By simply modifying the physical architecture of the intersection, behaviours changed almost immediately — without convincing anyone, without blaming anyone.
Look finally at environmental taxation. A carbon tax influences investment decisions far more effectively than an appeal to environmental responsibility. A tax credit can direct billions towards energy renovation. Binding emissions standards transform industrial strategies far more efficiently than voluntary charters. In every case, rules precede behaviours — and shape them.
Biology teaches a similar lesson. Species adapt to their environment. Modify that environment and you progressively modify the behaviours selected for. Institutions represent, for human societies, a comparable environment: they select certain strategies and discourage others.
Money: a social construction with very real effects
Among all human institutions, money occupies a singular place. It is often presented as a simple instrument of exchange. In reality, it is a social construction — and because we collectively place our trust in it, it organises our priorities, our economic calculations and even our representation of progress.
Money is not neutral.
Because it is today predominantly created as interest-bearing debt, it favours activities capable of generating monetary flows quickly enough to ensure repayment. This architecture naturally directs investment towards quantitative growth, financial valorisation and the exploitation of resources whose environmental costs remain largely invisible.
This is an institutional architecture inherited from centuries of history, designed to finance economic expansion — not to preserve the planet's ecological balances. To ask economic actors to spontaneously favour sobriety is to ask drivers to go the wrong way down a one-way street. A few will do so out of conviction. The majority will follow the implicit rules of the system.
Why is it so difficult to change the rules?
If institutions shape behaviour with such efficiency, why do public debates focus almost exclusively on individuals?
The first reason is ideological. For two centuries, mainstream economic thinking has often presented the market as a natural phenomenon that should be left to operate freely. To acknowledge that rules manufacture behaviour is to acknowledge that the economy is, above all, a political construction.
The second reason concerns established interests. Every institutional architecture creates winners. Those who benefit from existing rules have a natural interest in maintaining them, and resist changes that might undermine their advantages.
The third reason is cognitive. It is infinitely simpler to blame a consumer than to explain the mechanisms of money creation, taxation or incentive structures. Individual morality is far more media-friendly than institutional analysis.
The ecological transition is not primarily a moral problem
This is where Debunk'Onomy plants its flag.
The ecological crisis does not reflect a sudden moral degradation of humanity. Human beings respond, as they always have, to the incentives produced by their institutional environment. Today, that environment still largely rewards resource extraction, the externalisation of environmental costs and immediate consumption.
Durably changing behaviours therefore requires changing the rules of the game. The question is not whether such a transformation is desirable — it manifestly is. The question is which institutional architecture could make it possible.
This is precisely the logic that inspires NEMO IMS. By orienting money creation towards ecological and social regeneration rather than financial accumulation, such a system would modify the incentive structure. Restoring soils, strengthening territorial resilience or preserving ecosystems would progressively become economically advantageous. Capital, talent and innovation would then follow these new signals — not because individuals had become more virtuous, but because the rules had changed.
This is the very principle of any effective institution: change the rules, change the game.
What humanity truly lacks
Good intentions, scientific knowledge and the necessary technologies already exist. What is still missing are institutions capable of making these aspirations economically rational.
As long as the rules reward predation, predation will thrive — not through vice, but through logic. When the rules reward cooperation, ecosystem restoration and territorial robustness, these behaviours will cease to be individual sacrifices or acts of militancy. They will simply become the most natural way to act.
We long believed that institutions had to adapt to human nature. Perhaps we must now understand that human nature adapts above all to the institutions we build.
The true political question is no longer: how do we make people better?
It has become: what rules would allow ordinary people to collectively build a better world?
What if the main problem of our era is not the behaviour of individuals, but the rules that manufacture that behaviour?
Jean-Christophe Duval