Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant.Robert Louis Stevenson

September 2024

  • Yes, Democracy Is Messy

    It’s easy to say Democracy is messy, but what do we mean? I can only speak for my understanding as to why. Citizens are like the pieces of a mosaic, all equal but not all the same. We each have one vote, but the ignorant has the same vote as the learned, the one with full information has the same vote as the one with little information, the one with understanding as the one with little or none, the one who sees more clearly with the one who does not. Do I want to change this equality? Not in the least, changing it would mean we would harm democracy. But I would like to change the conditions under which we practice this democracy. I would want to create conditions and opportunities for the knowledge discrepancies which underlie our messiness to be reduced. As an example, take the word democracy, what does it mean, what does it stand for, what does it entail? What are its limits? What are the conditions under which it only looks like democracy but is no longer? While knowledge is key, so are its corollaries of facts, truth and what’s real.  But we now live in societies where the real and the unreal are not always distinguishable, and that is a huge obstacle which needs to be addressed and confronted. There’s certainly no magic bullet for all this, yet our educational system and our media do have roles to play.  I’m not suggesting conditions which would even out our individual differences, we are each and all, for instance, entitled to whatever intelligence we possess. But I have two suggestions, one to recognize that this underlying cause of democracy’s messiness comes with the territory, and two that we agree to make it more manageable. Then I think how might more easily surface.

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