Whatever About an Old Boat, How to Fix Democracy?

The work on the Anna M  goes on slowly, for a variety of reasons, leaving me plenty

Menu do dia, 8eur.

of time to reflect on the difficulties of bringing the simplest of projects to completion, and the best way to structure the processes involved. It also leaves me time to read the news; leaving all the tragedies to God, because not to do so would make life insupportable, I generally focus on the issues in which I feel able to exercise some degree of agency, however small; and of course, this business of Facebook and the internet is right there whenever we try to do anything these days.

It rather seems to me that that outfit is confronting us with the nature of contemporary society and modern democracy in ways that make it a lot easier to blame the techies than to confront the real issues. After all, for all the shock and horror, it seems that they were mainly doing, at a new level of sophistication, what democrats are generally supposed to do: find out what ‘the people’ want and give it to them, or to put it more accurately, what buttons to press in order to get what one wants and press them!

Of course, as the process becomes more sophisticated, it also becomes more expensive. ‘One’ has to have deep pockets, but it doesn’t take such a big shift to get a result, and hey presto, ‘the people have spoken’. Thus democracy degenerates into plutocracy, or worse. But on what basis do we suppose that politicians seek power and influence? It happened that the Duckie got to use the newest techniques just in time to help him make the right quacks or tweets or whatever they were about ‘crooked Hillary’. Would the liberal establishment be equally outraged if it were the other way round?

So what can we do about it? Change is not going to happen by way of deleting Facebook, though that might be a little step in the right direction; neither by revolution or sweeping dramatic reform; there is no easy fix and no great leader will get us there; what is required is change in attitudes. For a start, we have to realise that what we ‘like’, certainly at the superficial level touted by Facebook, is not the point; the most important truths are just as likely to be disliked. On the whole, responsibility and having to pay for one’s needs are not that pleasant; but any real democracy begins and ends with the willingness to take responsibility and to meet those costs.

Only love can enable us to do this, and that is an interpersonal affair. It is the very absence of a real human context to their lives that makes people so vulnerable to the pseudo context offered by mass media and mass politics. If we want democracy to survive in any meaningful way, we have to take as much responsibility as we can at an immediate, human level. Let those who prove themselves in little ways go on to represent us at ‘higher’ levels. Once they do so, make sure they stay in touch with their base, but let them make the decisions appropriate to their responsibility.

Democracy does not thrive by way of the tyranny of a majority, nor that of you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours. Let everyone's real voice, the fruit of their experience but not their vanity, be heard, and let decisions be reached by consensus. If one must make decisions by vote, insist on a two-third majority. It’s better again to choose who is going to take decisions and let them do it, like the skipper of a fishing boat!

Forget about left/right, and referenda especially where a simple majority ends up as ‘the Will of the People’. If everyone involved were to genuinely pray, to plug into the Divine energy, decisions would take themselves, as in a good marriage. Real polarity, with the energy flowing between the poles, is about the inverse of a binary ‘either/or’ where the flow between them is blocked. I do believe that if a critical mass of people refuse to settle for comfortable blocking mechanisms, forgetting about what they like and dislike but finding ways for their energy to flow even in the most unpromising little channels, the world will change amazingly.

Photos by Fiona.