Democracy - 2004

Democracy

Once upon a time, a bunch of Greeks were thinking. They did that a lot in the day. And so these bunch were thinking, and they thought, “Suppose everybody got to have a say in solving all the questions of the day.” Wouldn’t that be good?? They decided it would.

And so was born the little democratic seed that began as a simple gathering of citizens to drop their votes into a Greek jar. Questions were put, and citizens would jar their preferences. Math majors got to count the votes, and policy within the society was based on the majority call.

Somewhere, through the passing morphisms of society, democracy has now obtained a somewhat different definition. Democracy, as now practiced, is really an abdication of say, by the individual, to an elected representative who acts, supposedly at least, to represent the wishes of the people.

But somewhere in the collective gathering of regional representatives, and their alignment into teams competing for the power to make policy, democracy morphed into a system which enacts the will of the ruling Prime Minister, or President, or Cabinet.

Democracy, as originally defined, is ‘Government of the People, for the People, by the People’. As currently practiced, democracy might now be more aptly described as ‘Government to the People, by the Elected Few, for the Elected Few’.

The vote afforded to the people, in this modern democracy, is restricted to the appointment of representatives. And the representatives, in order to remain members-in-good-standing-of-the-ruling-team, actually abdicate their individual say to the captain of the team, or to some cliquish group of stars on the team.

So democracy is now simply the will of those few, irrespective of the will of the masses. Populations have no real say in the questions of passing days, and policies are established with indifference to the collective preference.

How did we slip from the original democratic ideal of simply letting the people decide, collectively, what to do?

It all got too complicated, and impossible, to collect the collective will, if you will, of the increasing population.

So the idea was born to have representatives, who could use their best judgment in casting a say for the collective mass.

And this worked fine, in the early days, for the representatives battled for the will of their individual collective masses.

But, through the passage of time, the role of the individual representative morphed and eventually became nothing more than that of an important digit holding space. All the little individual digits are now added up to determine the winning team, the leader of which gets to decide everything.

But this is no longer democracy. The people don’t get to decide anything, and have no personal power at all.

We are fortunate, now, in that technology has given us a way to return to a true form of democracy. As a system of communication and interaction, the internet now provides an infinite capacity. The counting of votes within this revolutionary new medium is a simple digital exercise.

We are now able to return to the democratic ideal. We are able, again, and in the face of our exploded mass of peoples, to permit direct collective decisions by citizens, about everything. We have the means, all we need is the collective will.

But alas, our system is now deeply rooted in the manifest power of a few teams of people, who, one or the other, have absolute dominion over us.

The elected team players are all privy to comfortable chairs and good pay, for simply keeping their digits in place. Policy is manifest from on high, and dissension is not recommended. Change, from within this system, is not particularly likely.

Until some brave individual citizens champion the ideals of real democracy, and fight to establish government-by-absolute-consensus-of-the-people, we’ll be stuck with, and will remain subjected to, the will of the leader of the elected few.