1The blank ballot

The last time I walked into a polling booth, I walked out with a blank ballot paper. Not out of laziness. Not out of cynicism. Not because politics bores me: I voted for thirty years, with the care of a man afraid of getting the candidate's name wrong. I walked out with a blank ballot because I had understood something simple and unpleasant: every vote cast without conviction is an approval, an agreement signed with one's eyes closed. I had been signing for thirty years. I did not feel guilty. For the first time, I felt honest.

I know what you are thinking, because I thought it myself: this way you hand the country to the worst of them. It is the right objection, and it is the first one I will answer. But first I must tell you what this manifesto is not. It is not an escape, it is not a protest, and above all it is not for ever.

It is a condition. Ten, in fact.

The booth

It always begins the same way, and you know how. The cold pencil between your fingers. The murmur outside fading to a hum as the curtain closes. The ballot in front of you, the symbols, the names and, in the middle of all this, the question that comes back every time unchanged: am I really choosing?

If you have voted ten times, you have carried that question inside you for decades and it has a metallic taste you recognise at once. If this is your first time, you feel it all the same: you have watched your parents come back from the polling station and sigh, you have heard the same disappointments at work, at university, around the kitchen table. You already know how it ends before it begins. They told you to vote, if only to limit the damage, and you did, out of duty or out of fear of something worse.

Then one side wins and you wait. The other side wins and you wait. The first side returns. The faces change little, the symbols are updated to suit the fashion, the slogans adapt to the times, while your life stays where it was, or gets worse. Services decline, taxes rise, distances grow, and the promises dissolve the day after the vote.

And every time, you return to the same booth to sign, with a cross, the same blank mandate to people who have never given you anything back. The labels change. The script does not. Written by others, performed for us. And the ending is always the same. Those who govern, govern for themselves. Those who vote are left watching.

The last drop

There was one precise moment when, for me, doubt turned into certainty, and I can tell you the year as well, because I have not forgotten it. The autumn of 2014.

I was on the sofa, alone, with the evening news on out of habit, that weary habit of someone who still wants to believe that something might change. There was an interview with the leader of the party I had voted for, who in those months was also heading the government. He was talking about the labour reform he was steering through Parliament, the Jobs Act, and about Article 18 of the Workers' Statute, the rule which since 1970 had obliged companies with more than fifteen employees to reinstate anyone dismissed without just cause. For anyone hired from then on, that protection was about to end. And the party ending it was the one that for forty years had defended it as a matter of decency, not of tactics.

I had voted for that party because of that protection. Not for a programme with figures and deadlines, but for something older and more solid than a programme, the conviction that certain lines are not crossed and that there are principles a party honours even when it governs, above all when honouring them is inconvenient.

What struck me, though, was not the reform itself. It was that the party leader never admitted to having changed course. He said, with a steady voice and his eyes on the camera, that the real left does not defend those already inside against those left outside, that Article 18 had become a symbol rather than a protection, that being progressive meant creating new jobs instead of protecting old ones. He used the words of the rallies, the same certainty and the same tone, to say the exact opposite of what those words had meant until the day before, and he did it without a flicker of hesitation, as though nothing had happened in between. In his version it was not a betrayal. It was the truer loyalty.

I sat still for longer than I realised and, when I looked down, the coffee had gone cold in the cup. I did not touch it.

Here I must tell you something, because I do not want you to read this scene as the defeat of one side only. If you vote for the other side, you have your own version of this moment. The words change, the face changes, the thing betrayed changes. The grammar does not.

It was not anger; I had spent that too many times. It was something colder, the certainty that this was neither a mistake nor the pressure of a difficult coalition, but the system working exactly as it had been designed to work. Not for me. Not for us. Inside the party some protested, the country's largest trade union took to the streets, part of the governing majority walked out of the chamber when the vote was taken, and the voices echoed in the newspapers for a few weeks before fading, as they always do. The reform passed. The leader went on governing and nobody ever called him to account for that reversal, because nobody could, since the mandate was his for years to come.

No consequences.

This was not the story of one treacherous politician, and that is not the point. It was the proof that the system runs on a different grammar from ours. Identities are worth something as long as they help you win, and they dissolve the moment you have to govern for real. Every time I went back into that booth, I was learning that grammar as though it were my own. I was learning to demand nothing, to wait for the next round.

It was a cold certainty, dull and final, like a door locked from the outside.

It was the last time I accepted it.

The pencil that did not move

At the following election I went back into the booth. The same booth, the same ballot, the same muffled silence. The pencil did not move.

This manifesto begins there. With a blank ballot that was not empty at all, because it held everything that was wrong and that no cross could have put right.

Democracy cannot be a rite that asks you for faith. It must be the guarantee that power belongs to those who live under it. Without that guarantee, a vote is not freedom. It is an alibi.

What follows does not ask you to believe me. It asks you for three things, in this order. To check two facts that really happened, on two different continents. To judge an analysis. And finally, to read ten conditions, written so that anyone can verify, with the evidence in hand, whether they have been met or not. The day they are met, we will vote again. Not a day later.

2It has happened before

I begin with the facts, because that is what I promised you. Two countries, two continents, two different decades. In both, millions of people withheld their consent from those who governed them, and in both, power had to change its own rules. If you think all of this is a fantasy, these are the two cases you need to know before you decide.

Bangladesh, 1994

It began with a disputed by-election in March of that year. The opposition denounced the rigging and walked out of parliament. Then, on 28 December, it did something that in a representative democracy sounds almost unthinkable: 147 MPs resigned. They gave up their seats, their salaries, their platform. Their demand was disarmingly simple, since all it asked was that elections be held not under those who already held power, but under a neutral caretaker government.

The government in office ignored the demand and went to the polls alone. On 15 February 1996 the ruling party took 278 seats out of 300, most of them without a single opponent in the field, and on paper it was a total triumph. In reality it was a public slap in the face, because 21 per cent of the electorate turned out to vote, barely more than one in five: the lowest turnout in the country's parliamentary history.

A parliament elected almost unanimously by almost no one.

That government lasted twelve days. On 26 March parliament passed the thirteenth constitutional amendment, under which from that moment every election would be held under a neutral caretaker government. Four days later the prime minister resigned and parliament was dissolved. In June the country voted again under the new rules, and turnout rose to 75.6 per cent. More than three and a half times higher.

Everything has to be said, though, because the truth holds up better than a convenient version of it. It was not a mild affair: alongside the empty polling stations there were general strikes that paralysed the country for weeks, and there was violence. But that was not what broke the government — strikes and violence were things that system had absorbed many times before. What broke it was a number from which there was no going back. Power can clear a square. It cannot govern a void.

And there is an epilogue I have to tell you myself, before someone else does. That thirteenth amendment no longer exists: it was ruled unconstitutional in 2011 and superseded by a later reform. The victory was dismantled.

This is not a refutation. It is the most important warning in the whole story. A rule is won in months and lost in silence. That is why we are not asking for promises, but for ten written and measurable conditions. And winning them is not enough either: you then have to keep watching those who apply them.

Chile, 1988

I will warn you straight away, because it is more honest: at first sight this looks like a case that contradicts me. It does not, but it has to be faced squarely. After fifteen years of dictatorship, Augusto Pinochet called a plebiscite convinced he would win it. A single question, a Yes or a No to his remaining in power for another eight years. He controlled the army, the electoral machinery and, to a large extent, the flow of information. It looked like a formality.

The opposition, divided for years and tempted by a boycott, chose the road opposite to ours. It chose to vote. And it did so with a discipline worth more than any slogan, reopening the battle over the electoral registers that had been closed since 1973 and bringing more than ninety per cent of adults to register; training tens of thousands of observers; building a parallel count, polling station by polling station, so that it would never have to ask the regime how many votes it had received. On 5 October 1988 the No won with 55.99 per cent. Turnout among registered voters was 97.6 per cent.

Pinochet did not accept it. At one in the morning he summoned the military junta to the Moneda Palace with a decree already drawn up that would have given him emergency powers and annulled the result. The air force commander refused to sign. The others refused as well. And shortly before that, entering the palace around midnight, when no official result had yet been announced, that same general had stopped in front of the journalists and said that the No had won.

The number was already public, and that is probably what saved the result, because a square can be cleared in a single night, whereas a figure everyone has already read goes on existing afterwards. A public number is far harder to annul than a crowd in a square. The following year, free elections were held.

What two such different stories have in common

In Bangladesh, consent was withheld by deserting the ballot box. In Chile it was withheld by filling it. Opposite instruments, identical logic. In both cases, millions of people did exactly the same thing: they made their refusal organised, declared and countable, which is something other than staying at home. Not a mood, not an opinion poll, not an outburst, but a published number that no one could dispute and no one could file away as apathy.

That is the point, and it is the only one that truly matters.

Power does not fear our anger. It fears our arithmetic.

The instrument, in turn, is dictated by the system itself. Where there is a ballot that allows you to say No in a verifiable way, you use the ballot: that is precisely what we ask for in the first of the ten conditions. Where that ballot does not exist, where it offers only variants of the same power, No is expressed in the only way left. By withdrawing consent. And by counting it.

3Why voting is no longer enough

Imagine boarding an aircraft and discovering that the pilot has never flown. He was chosen because he is likeable, because he speaks well, because he is somebody's friend. Do you feel that tightening in your stomach? It is the same one you should feel every time somebody decides about your health, your work, the water you drink and the air you breathe. The challenges of the coming decades — climate, artificial intelligence, migration, pandemics, conflict, international trade — will demand competence, vision and the courage to say uncomfortable things.

The system does not select for that. It selects for loyalty, for skill on the campaign trail and for the ability to tell people what they want to hear, and once somebody has reached power it rewards those who do not disturb the balance that carried them there.

This is not only a question of justice. It is a question of survival.

The lie that holds everything up

We were taught that taking part means one thing only: putting a cross on a ballot paper every few years. That gesture was given the name of popular sovereignty. It is a lie, and not an innocent one either, because it is the lie on which the rest of the building rests. Sovereignty is not a gesture: it is a power, and it consists in controlling those who govern, measuring what they do, stopping them when they betray and replacing them when necessary. Where all this is missing, the rite remains standing and the compact is already broken. They know it perfectly well too.

The three mechanisms

This is not disorder, and that is why it does not correct itself. It is a mechanism, and it has three parts. The democratic form stays intact while the substance drains out through three holes.

Representation without choice and visibility without pluralism. Closed lists, candidacies settled in advance, impenetrable party filters. You go to vote and you find names chosen by others, in rooms we will never enter. What is left to you is the illusion of alternation. Never a real alternative. The media and the social platforms amplify what divides and crush the inconvenient voices. Algorithms nobody can inspect decide what reaches your eyes. We do not see what is relevant, but what suits those holding the megaphone of power.

Legality without verification. Procedures may be in order on paper. But if citizens cannot check anything — from election campaign money to the chain of custody of the vote — legality remains a façade, handsome outside and empty within.

Accountability without consequences. Tolerated conflicts of interest, revolving doors between public office and private business, promises broken without penalty, mandates nobody can revoke. Those who govern can be wrong, can lie, can betray, and remain untouchable.

Three parts, one single result: you can take part in everything except the decisions.

And anger is not enough

Anger is comfortable. It makes you feel alive, responsive, still in the fight. The system knows this, and that is why it lets you be angry. It lets you shout until you lose your voice, demonstrate outside its buildings, even win the odd marginal battle. The real rules, though, the ones that establish who can stand for election, where the money comes from and how the votes are counted, those nobody ever touches.

The system has learned to absorb everything. The protest vote it simply banks. Outrage it turns into noise, shuts in a soundproofed room and moves on. Those who believe they are fighting the system often end up oiling its gears. And what is left to you, in the end, is the only thing left to anyone who decides nothing, which is to wait for the next election and hope.

But hope without power is not democracy. It is prayer.

4The right to say No, the right to abstain

The day I stopped voting was the day I took back my power. Not because that gesture, on its own, changes anything, since one man who does not vote remains a statistic. But because for the first time I chose what actually matters. Not whom to send into government, picked from a menu prepared by others, but whom to grant legitimacy and whom to deny it.

From here on I stop saying "I".

I must tell you at once what this we is, because there are far too many of them about that never declare themselves. It is not a party. It is not a movement with an office, a membership card, a leader and a symbol to print. It is not even a group of people who know one another. It is anyone who, reading these pages, recognises their own experience and accepts the condition that follows from it. Nobody is asking you to join anything. You are being asked to demand something.

What it is not

I wrote at the beginning that this act is not an escape, not a protest and not for ever. Here is why.

It is not an escape: we remain in public life, in civic scrutiny, in the data, in the petitions. We are not going anywhere. It is not violence, nor nostalgia for the strongman: we are not looking for a saviour to decide in our place, we want rules that hold even against him. It is not resignation — and resignation is exactly what the system expects from us. Not our anger, which it has been banking for decades. Our exhaustion.

The three rules of our No

Peaceful. No shortcuts, no force, no harm to anyone.

Legal. We are exercising a right that already exists, the right to abstain, and giving it a new meaning.

Temporary and conditional. It is not a never again. It is an until, tied to minimum conditions that are clear and measurable. The day they become law, we will vote again.

Our vote is the fuel of the system. Not the money, not the media, not the alliances, which are the engine, and an engine without fuel goes nowhere. Whoever is at the wheel knows this better than we do, which is why every five years we are asked to fill the tank. Abstaining in this way is not switching off the engine but turning off the tap, and pouring that fuel where it produces real control — citizens' assemblies with binding outcomes, civic monitoring built on open data, independent election observation, political money traceable down to the last penny.

We do not shout to vent, we measure in order to change.

We do not destroy out of anger, we build out of stubbornness.

We do not withdraw out of weariness, since we will return the moment the compact becomes credible again.

A tide that does not break, but lifts.

Before the conditions, an admission

There is something that has to be said, though, before we allow ourselves to lay down any conditions at all. For years we fed this system too. We tolerated favouritism, nepotism, patronage. We voted while holding our noses, telling ourselves it was enough, that it was better than nothing for the time being. We are not the victims of a power that fell from above; we were its guarantors, one electoral round after another, with the pencil in our hands.

Anyone who does not acknowledge their own part has no right to demand anything. We acknowledge ours.

Today we choose a different responsibility: that of no longer being complicit.

And here are the conditions.

5The Ten Non-Negotiables

The first six conditions concern the day of the vote: whom you can choose, who funds them, who pays when they abuse their position, what reaches your eyes, how the votes are counted, who is allowed to stand. The last four concern the thousand days in between — ninety-nine per cent of democracy, and the only stretch where today you have no power at all.

1A real choice, or none

Principle. Sovereignty is not the rite of voting. It is the possibility of genuinely choosing: not the least bad, but the one we consider the best.

Minimum condition. The ballot paper carries the binding option "None of the Above". Not a spoilt ballot, not a blank paper to be filed away, but an option with real consequences. If it wins or passes a significant threshold — a quarter of the votes, or a plurality in the constituency — the election is rerun within sixty days, candidacies reopen, and those rejected cannot stand again in that round.

The ballot stops being a blind obligation. It becomes an instrument of judgement.

2Money in the open

You do not know who funds the politician smiling at you from the screen. You do not know where the money for his campaign comes from, nor whom he will have to repay once elected. They are asking you for blind trust.

Principle. Consent is not owed. It is granted only if power can be checked, and power is checked by following the money.

Minimum condition. Income and expenditure of parties and candidates published within 48 hours in open format. Caps on donations. A ban on anonymous funds. Tracking of micro-payments and cryptocurrency donations, with verified identity.

If you cannot see where the money comes from, you do not know whom your government obeys.

3Nobody above the law

How many times have you seen a politician accused of corruption stay in his post, get himself re-elected and escape through the expiry of the proceedings? That "nothing ever changes anyway" you thought is the symptom. The absence of consequences is the disease.

Principle. Without real consequences for those who abuse power, legality is a façade.

Minimum condition. An independent anti-corruption authority, appointed jointly by parliament and by citizens selected by lot, with a fixed non-renewable mandate, a budget guaranteed by law, autonomous investigative powers, access to all relevant databases, and a public annual report.

The law must apply to everyone. Above all to those who write it.

4Different voices, genuinely

Principle. Voters must be able to hear different voices on fair terms. An uninformed vote is not a free vote.

Minimum condition. Balanced and certified airtime, on television and online. Public archives of every political advertisement, with content, spending, sponsor and targeting criteria. Independent audits of platform algorithms during campaigns.

Democracy dies in the silence of the voices nobody allows to speak.

5A vote anyone can verify

Principle. Trust is not requested, it is demonstrated. Every vote must be verifiable.

Minimum condition. A verifiable record of every vote, on paper or an equivalent medium. Results published, polling station by polling station, within twenty-four hours in open format. A documented chain of custody. Guaranteed access for independent civic observers. Sample audits carried out under a published methodology.

If you cannot verify the vote, you are believing. You are not taking part.

6People, not clans

Have you ever thought of standing for election? Probably not. Not because you would be incapable of it, but because you know that without a party behind you, without someone to put you forward, you have no chance at all. Politics is a closed club, with guards at the door.

Principle. Representation is credible only if those with competence and commitment can genuinely enter it.

Minimum condition. Candidacies opened through public primaries under uniform rules and funded by the state, or through a civic route with verified digital signatures. Reasonable thresholds. No financial barriers. Fair access to public communication space.

Democracy cannot be an inheritance. It must be an open door.

7Deciding the hard things together

Principle. On complex questions — the environment, health, taxation, pensions, artificial intelligence — what is needed is time, plural evidence and real deliberation. Not slogans shouted during a campaign. Nor is this a laboratory hypothesis, because citizens' assemblies selected by lot already work in Ireland, in France and in Belgium, where one of them has become a permanent institution alongside the regional parliament.

Minimum condition. At least two citizens' assemblies selected by lot each year on strategic questions, with plural information, professional facilitation, and an obligation on government and parliament to respond within ninety days with a reasoned yes or no. Where they refuse, a confirmatory referendum or a published alternative plan.

Citizens are not spectators. They are the primary source of power.

8Removable, always

Once elected, the person representing you can break every promise, change party, vote against the programme they were elected on, and stay in place until the end of the term. You can do nothing. For years. That is not a mandate, it is an immunity.

Principle. Power must always be revocable and always time-limited.

Minimum condition. Recall of elected representatives: if a fifth of the voters in the constituency collect the signatures, a confidence vote is held within sixty or ninety days. Clear limits on the number of terms, which cannot be circumvented, for executive offices and for the senior positions in the legislature.

Those who govern serve the citizens. When they stop, the citizens must be able to replace them.

9One master only

Principle. Those who decide cannot be indebted to private interests, present or future.

Minimum condition. A strict regime governing conflicts of interest and the revolving door. Assets held in a blind trust for the duration of office. A cooling-off period of three to five years before taking up roles in the sectors they have overseen. A public register of appointments and shareholdings. Criminal penalties for breaches and for false declarations.

If the one who decides has a second master, the first — the citizen — always loses.

10The data is yours

Try asking your local authority how much it spent on a contract. Try finding out whom your mayor met last week. Almost always you will find a wall built of silence, bureaucracy and delay. And yet that data is yours, and you paid for it.

Principle. Public information belongs to citizens, not to whoever happens to be governing.

Minimum condition. A single national portal for freedom of information requests. A mandatory reply within twenty days. Automatic publication of contracts, procurement, spending and diaries of meetings with interest groups, in open format. Financial and disciplinary penalties for those who stay silent or delay without a legal ground.

Transparency is not a favour granted by power. It is a right that belongs to us.

Ten conditions. Not one of them requires human nature to change, and each of them already exists, in some form, somewhere in the world. These conditions ask only that we stop having to trust.

6The likely objections

"If you do not vote, you help the worst of them."

It is the most common objection, and it comes from an honest doubt. But look it in the face. Do you not think we have been helping the worst of them for decades, by accepting that the only available choice is between variants of the same decline? It is the resigned vote, the least bad repeated for generations, that has allowed the system never to correct itself. Consent that arrives regardless is not a barrier: it is a guarantee. And nobody here is saying never to vote again. What is being said is simply this: recognise the moment when voting stops being participation and becomes legitimation.

"This way you abandon democracy."

The right to vote includes the right not to exercise it. We take nothing from anyone: those who want to vote will vote, and we will always defend their right to do so. We are not asking for elections to be abolished, we are asking that they become a choice again. Our refusal is not sabotage, but a contract offered in public, with the conditions written out one by one, with the thresholds and the timescales. Sabotage hides. We publish.

"It is pointless, nobody will listen to you."

On your own, no. An individual choice is irrelevant; I wrote that a few pages ago and I stand by it. A collective choice, organised and declared, is another matter — and it has happened on two different continents, in two different decades, and in both cases power had to rewrite its own rules.

"Your abstention is identical to the abstention of people who simply do not care."

Here I have to concede the point. Today it is. Every year millions of people do not vote, and every year power files that figure away as laziness, disillusion, indifference. As long as refusal remains a void, the interpretation of that void belongs to those who govern. It makes no difference how noble your reason for staying at home may be, since nobody knows it.

And that is why this document does not first of all ask you not to vote. It asks you to demand that there be an instrument that makes that No countable. A public register in which one's abstention is declared, with name, date and reason. Verifiable by anyone. Aggregated and published on the evening of the vote itself, alongside the official turnout figure. Independent of any party — including any party that might one day be born out of this.

That instrument does not exist today. You will not find it at the end of these pages: there is no form to sign, and pretending otherwise would be precisely the kind of promise this manifesto reproaches in those who govern us. I am not asking you to join anything. I am asking you to recognise that this mechanism has to be built, and to be ready to use it.

A refusal nobody counts is noise. A refusal that is counted is a force. The distance between the two is a number.

7The breaking point

The window

The rules governing what we will be allowed to decide in the coming decades are being written as you read. Who has access to the data, who controls the platforms, who decides which questions may be asked and which may not: these are all contests that are closing, not opening. And systems do not age by becoming more flexible. Every year that passes without a rule being changed, that rule becomes harder to change — because in the meantime somebody has built a career, a budget, a habit on top of it. I have no date to give you. But I know which way time is moving, and it is not moving in our favour.

And if it really happened

Someone will object that low turnout already exists. That is true, and it should be said honestly. In many democracies barely half the electorate now votes, and nobody has ever resigned over it. The reason is simple. Abstention that is diffuse, slow and mute is indistinguishable from exhaustion, and in the official records the two leave the same trace. And exhaustion is something power handles perfectly well.

What it cannot handle has three characteristics, and they were the same in Bangladesh and in Chile. It is sudden: it arrives in a single election, not over thirty years. It is coordinated: behind it lies one demand, written down, the same for everybody. And it is attributable: the number cannot be explained away by bad weather on polling day, by a long weekend, by generalised disaffection.

Suppose, then, that it really happened. Eight voters out of ten do not turn up, on the same day, all giving the same reason. The next day the government takes office all the same, lawfully. But legality and legitimacy have come apart in front of everyone and, from that moment on, every single decision taken will have a number standing next to it, contesting it. And nobody will have had to break anything.

We will not vote until

We will not vote until the lists are opened and candidacies stop being settled elsewhere.

We will not vote until political money comes out of the shadows.

We will not vote until corruption carries real consequences.

We will not vote until dissenting voices can be heard.

We will not vote until every vote can be verified by anyone.

We will not vote until decisions are taken with us.

We will not vote until those who betray can be removed.

We will not vote until the data we pay for is opened.

And we will return to the ballot box on the day these conditions become law. Not a day later, not a day more.

This digital document is free and always will be. It belongs to anyone who believes that democracy should be real, not performed.

It is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0). You may copy, share, print, adapt and distribute it freely, provided you give appropriate credit to the author and indicate if any changes were made.

Because ideas, when they serve to give power back to those who have been deprived of it, must not stay locked away. They must circulate.

Declaration of independence and disclaimer

This document is a work of civic reflection written by the author solely in his capacity as a private citizen, in the exercise of the freedom of expression guaranteed by Article 11 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union and by Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Institutional independence. The opinions, analyses, proposals and value judgements contained in this publication are the exclusive expression of the author's personal thinking. They do not reflect, do not represent and do not in any way commit the position of any institution, body, office or agency of the European Union, nor of any other entity, organisation or employer, whether public or private.

Confidentiality. No confidential or privileged information, and no information obtained in the exercise of professional duties, has been used, directly or indirectly, in the preparation of this publication. Its content rests exclusively on publicly available sources and on the author's own civic reasoning.

Political and financial independence. This publication is not promoted, funded, sponsored or inspired by any political party, movement, organisation or private entity. The author has no organic ties to any political force.

Purpose. This publication is intended for civic and educational purposes only. It does not constitute incitement to hatred, violence or discrimination, nor to the breach of any law. It expressly upholds democratic values, the rule of law and the fundamental rights of the person.

Transparency note

The ideas, the argument, the structure of the ten conditions, the examples, all the content and the episode recounted in these pages are the author's own. In revising the text and in producing the English translation, the author made use of an AI assistant (Claude, by Anthropic). Every choice was read, checked and approved by the author, who takes full responsibility for what is written here.