Participatory Democracy

Why is democracy considered an ideal form of government?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://www.quora.com/Why-is-democracy-considered-an-ideal-form-of-government/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1“

There is no such thing as an “ideal form of government” because humans are from “ideal.”

What makes democracy a superior form of government to all others is self-determination.

What makes democracy a far more chaotic form of government than all others is self-determination.

No other form of governance is as capable as a democracy of facilitating the full achievement of human potential because no other form of governance empowers individuality.

No other form of governance is as prone to overt assaults against it, while no other form of governance can survive those assaults.

Human nature demands self-determination, while the assaults against democracy today are born of that demand for self-determination — albeit in horrifically corrupted and myopically self-serving terms.

Think about the perspectives of those displaying an aggrieved assault against democracy. They are commonly born from an autocratic mindset which expects the world to conform to their perspectives. They interpret the evolution of society as a rejection of their insular views and a violation of their rights to those views. It is Frankenstein’s monster of cancerous individuality disguising a toxic desire for sublimation to authoritarian rule by people who imagine freedom as their right to dictate the lives of others.

They are not entirely oblivious to the inherent hypocrisies they champion, or they would otherwise not conduct their protests while disguising their identities or hiding behind masks or fake profiles, managing multiple sock-puppet accounts on social media.

They are the disruptive elements in a democratic society screaming a need for a much more coherent strategy for social development. The challenge at hand, however, is not an authoritarian solution dictated to the masses, as history’s failures have made clear. Today’s dynamic in an information-rich society demands a supportive strategy of education and social welfare programs providing opportunities for healing and growth for a species emerging out of a dark and brutal history while still suffering the effects of generational PTSD.

For democracy to survive its current challenges and begin to approach whatever may be deemed as an “ideal form of governance,” our systems must evolve to prioritize the people over the plutocracy seeking to regress human civilization to a medieval state of rulers and serfs.

We will otherwise find ourselves repeating the bloody histories of our ancestors who sacrificed everything to win the freedoms far too many take for granted today.

In today’s world, the closest examples we have to an “ideal democracy” are embodied within the Nordic models of social democracy.

We would save countless lives if we could take stock of how fundamentally destructive the world’s current adoption of right-wing ideologies is for human society and global stability.

How to Restore, Strengthen and Preserve a Democracy

Democracies are strengthened by the degree of engagement by the people. The more people become informed, engaged with, and involved with their government and its activities, the more secure the democracy.

A disengaged and apathetic citizenry makes a government susceptible to corruption.

Restoring and reinforcing the stability of democracy begins in the classroom with a comprehensive civics-oriented strategy for equipping students with the skills and insights to achieve success in effective governance and their personal lives.

As it turns out, the overlap in skills for effective governance and success in one’s personal life are represented as an almost clean circle in a Venn diagram.

The range of interpersonal skills one can and should develop are core competencies for life. Communication skills, negotiation skills, and conflict resolution skills are all universally valuable skills. Developing competencies in areas like Robert’s Rules of Order and understanding the nature and process of effective legislation (rules to live by) may be more niche but are transferable skills that can be applied in other areas of life, particularly when they’re not considered obscure skills by a majority like they are now.

The more people who know how to declare a point of order, the fewer conflicts could escalate into violence.

Of course, the development of logic and critical thinking skills should be included in the curriculum, if not as courses but as strategies for delivering an existing course load.

Applying critical thinking skills development within a history class, for example, would increase student engagement simply by structuring the information delivery process through a means that challenges one’s thinking skills.

On an entirely different and equally crucial level is the reinforcement of a commitment to the role of the Fourth Estate in society. The profit motive must be removed to protect objectivity in the information delivery process, ensuring the public is adequately informed of relevant news in the most agnostic way possible.

Breaking corporate media into community-based employee co-ops will create a culture of checks and balances that approach the self-regulating effectiveness of the peer review process within the scientific community.

The election process is another area that must be made as agnostic as possible. Removing the undue influence of money in elections and reducing the tribalism of the currently corrosive culture in politics is critical to mitigating ideological bias. First-past-the-post elections should be replaced with proportional representation and ranked-choice voting.

With these measures, an exceptionally stable democracy can emerge on level ground with inbuilt resistance to corruption.

Leon Wieseltier — Quote on Democracy

How to Effectively Empower Individuals in Society

Good Information Leads to Good Decisions — Jack Welch

Let’s distill this issue into its simplest perspective.

Knowledge is Power

The most effective approach is also the approach that focuses on the most crucial responsibility for a democracy to fulfill if the people truly want to create a stable society capable of achieving its potential as a peaceful and prosperous community.

Education is the most effective way to empower people. It’s the only way to empower people.

Every other method involves coercion, imposition, and, ultimately, the subjugation and deterioration of a people.

Nothing empowers an individual more than learning to accomplish goals in ways they never thought possible before. Nothing brings society together in a common cause more than the information all members need to make good decisions for themselves.

Everything we see today recognized as toxic and destructive to democracy is directly due to an abysmal level of education. From the cheerleading to the taunts, to the entrenchments, to the emotionally unhinged betrayals of the social contract, can be traced back to a paucity of education.

Racism, misogyny, and all the bigotries eroding relationships and community cohesion to contribute to escalations in conflict to feed criminal behaviours can be cured with appropriate levels and forms of education and public awareness campaigns.

People can learn to protect themselves without relying on a nanny state if the nanny state could stop infantilizing its public.

Democracy has been perpetually criticized for its chaotic nature by people who judge democracy by its lowest common denominator, but that destroys every form of governance.

Democracy is an inspirational form of governance because it is built upon the initiative and ingenuity derived from the fruits of individual potential all benefit from.

Leaders and caretakers of the public good must serve as teachers and coaches for those who struggle to cope with challenges.

We should not strive to impose, direct, herd, or subdue people but show them the paths they can take to achieve their best selves and our best communities.

We have no problem taking this approach within our learning institutions because we have learned from experience how to motivate students to achieve their best.

Somehow, though, we reverse course once the educational curriculum is completed, and that’s to the detriment of everything we hold dear in society.

It’s because we do not extend a supportive, proactive, and growth-oriented approach to cultivating our societies that we have an escalating force of militarized subjugation of the people. Those tasked with the responsibility of protecting and serving the public have metastasized into a destructive force of militarized imposition on the people to become state-sanctioned terrorist operations.

It’s because we have not learned to appreciate what we learned from our institutions of learning that the state empowers its protectors with an attitude of entitlement to brutally abuse its people and be responsible for committing homicides of the people and being protected by the state for their betrayals of justice.

We have allowed ourselves to develop an entirely destructive approach to reactionary mismanagement of society and the issues we all struggle to live with.

It is because we abandon the lessons taught to society by its leaders in education — of all forms, that innocent citizens can be murdered in their beds while sleeping by those who are supposed to protect them.

The lowest common denominator that critics love to cite when bashing democracies is not the least educated among us but those who are educated and who abandon their lessons to wallow in their basest instincts.

The lowest common denominators among us are the leaders who fail to lead us.

The lowest common denominators among us are those who are allegedly trained in conflict de-escalation while adopting conflict escalation techniques to murder innocent citizens.

We need to change that dynamic and fire every leader who does not inspire better behaviours from the rest of us. Leaders in society must be aspirational, not deaden, depress, or dishearten us all to disengage from our responsibilities to self-govern.

We cannot create a thriving democracy by tearing each other down and shutting people out of our roles and responsibilities to ourselves and our self-governance.

We cannot tolerate those who fail to lead us to a better world because we can see the trajectory of self-destruction occurring everywhere corrupt leadership exists.

If we want human civilization to survive, our leaders must do more than provide lip service to hope. Our leaders must empower the people to cultivate hope on an individual basis. This is the only way for us to come together to solve our common problems and preserve our present to protect a future for our children.

We cannot accept less than those who can lead by example because the examples we live with now demand violence to eject them from our midst lest we lose everything we hold dear.

Leon Wieseltier — Democracy