Later this month a Resilience Councils Handbook will be published. Based on various earlier documents, including blog posts, an Annex to the Handbook has been drafted to firmly ground the concept of Resilience Councils in a philosophical, theoretical, and future-oriented practical foundation. Below is the Annex’s executive summary.
Exec sum
This Annex sets out a comprehensive, non-totalitarian strategy for countering Foreign Information Manipulation (FIMI) by structurally strengthening societal resilience.
The core argument is grounded in an empathetic-utilitarian ethical framework. Within this framework, the societal objective is defined as the maximization of the lived experience of four fundamental human needs: autonomy, belonging, achievement, and safety. The degree to which these needs are experientially fulfilled constitutes the primary, measurable components of a resilient society.
To operationalize this objective, the annex introduces the Interdemocracy program. Interdemocracy implements a genuine “whole-of-society” approach by systematically incorporating the perspectives of the general public — described here as “belief-speaking” — into institutional decision-making processes. By moving beyond exclusive reliance on expert consensus, this approach captures citizens’ lived experience and provides a corrective feedback loop that is otherwise absent from conventional governance models.
The theoretical justification for this method is derived from the concept of autopoiesis: the capacity of a system to reproduce, maintain, and correct itself. Interdemocracy is positioned as the practical mechanism through which societal autopoiesis can be realized. It does so by addressing the structural tension between individual agency and collective stability. Enhanced individual agency is both an intrinsic normative goal and an instrumental means of improving the quality, legitimacy, and adaptability of institutional decision-making.
This dual function can be illustrated through the metaphor of a “resilience battery.” The battery represents the adaptive capacity of the individual citizen. It is “charged” when fundamental human needs are maximally fulfilled — through increased agency enabled by Interdemocracy and through heightened institutional responsiveness to citizen input.
The Interdemocracy program faces substantial implementation challenges. These include logistical constraints at scale and, more critically, the willingness and capacity of governmental institutions to integrate belief-speaking in a substantive rather than symbolic manner.
Crucially, the relevance of institutional responsiveness differs between actors. For the current political system, responsiveness is essential to maintaining legitimacy and functional stability. For individuals, by contrast, autopoiesis and self-resilience are valuable in their own right, irrespective of institutional uptake. This asymmetry gives rise to a central political question: will increased individual self-resilience develop within the existing institutional framework and thereby reinforce it, or will it emerge outside an unresponsive system—ultimately bypassing it?