DEMOCRACY

It is coming through a hole in the air From those nights in Tiananmen Square It ́s coming from the feel That ain ́t exactly real Or it ́s real, but it ́s not exactly there Leonard Cohen

 Democracy 

THE ILLUSION OF DEMOCRACY 

Without idealism, politics is reduced to a kind of "social accounting!"

Tony Judt.

It is said that democracy is losing its appeal and that more and more people are tired of this democracy, which is completely wrong, because it is difficult to get tired of something that does not exist.
On the other hand, it is not entirely impossible that people start to tire of the so-called representative democracy, which means that a few selected politicians manage the political affairs for everyone else, who - during the term of office - get the opportunity to realize their private life projects.
In a society where political centralization has generated an increasingly widening gap between power and the people, where more and more people experience a kind of political exclusion.
In the increasingly widening gap between power and the people, there is growing resignation and frustration in the ranks of the people, which not infrequently expresses itself in various forms of contempt and downright contempt for the political elite, which in itself means a breeding ground for a feeling of political exclusion.

We have, as the British political scientist Colin Crouch describes it, ended up in a post-democratic state with all that this entails.Where more and more people do not feel included in democracy, where they feel that they lack the ability to influence society or to make their voice heard.
Actually, it shouldn't be very surprising that people get tired of the kind of politics that goes on beyond our references and about which we know so little, where we only have to speculate about how thoughts go before decisions.

It is also not so strange that people feel powerless and get tired of a political system that assumes that whoever has the greatest decision-making authority has the least contact with the plan, where the consequences of the decisions become reality, while the one who has the most contact with the human side of the decisions consequences, lacks decision-making authority. Harald Ofstad

 The so-called representative democracy of our time, where a few politicians manage politics for us, is not about popular rule, but about tyranny, in other words, it is not about democracy but about oligarchy, where oligarchy means precisely tyranny.
It is for this reason that I dared to state at the beginning of this text that democracy - in the true sense of the word - does not exist.

The closest we in Sweden have been to democracy is probably before the municipal merger in the 70s, when democracy was a living and locally rooted reality that concerned the people. At the time when democracy was a vital popular and educational movement, which made people experience meaningful contexts in the joint community building work.

Over time, these grassroots movements, driven by zealots and carried by a common idea, have gradually been incorporated into the bureaucratic forms of the people's home and thereby lost their independence in more institutional forms.

The political activity of today's modern man extends at its height to visiting a polling station every four years, which according to the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is about "selective aristocracy" where the power of citizens lies in choosing our own rulers. In the course of these four years, we have to praise or complain about the municipal service, in that the citizen has abdicated his political responsibility and been cut off from being a part of the joint community building work.

The French social scientist Marcel Gauchet believes that it has gone so far that our time has produced the first man in history, who is unaware of society; She is not unaware of society in the superficial sense of not noticing it.
She is unaware of society in the sense that she is no longer aware of the social conditions of her own existence, and of her own "embedding" in a larger collective, and of what this has entailed for thousands of years in the form of obligations and duties.

It should be added that it is not only about obligations, but above all about opportunities in a social context where "true democracy cannot be justified in any other way than as an effort to liberate and develop the personality", as the former democracy advocate Herbert Tingsten once said .

After all, in some kind of general unconsciousness, we can still live in the notion that we have democracy, we are still in a state of law where we have freedom of the press and freedom of speech and the law on universal suffrage enshrined in the constitution!

 Sure, these freedoms are certainly some expression of democracy, - as long as we have them - but if we think we have democracy, for the sole reason that we have universal suffrage enshrined in the constitution, we are living in a deceptive illusion of what democracy is is and is not. Furthermore, this with the right to vote and majority decisions has a very weak connection to democracy, some of those who helped invent democracy, went so far as to say that democracy disappeared when we started voting, which in itself is a statement that today can regarded as purely prophetic.

Especially considering that in Europe there is a noticeable tendency to actually vote democracy away, which happened in Germany in the 30s, in the Balkans in the 90s and in Hungary, Poland and a number of other countries in the 2000s.

Democracy on really

DEMOCRACY ON

REALLY!

If we then ask ourselves what democracy is, and how true democracy can be realized and restored, we must turn our ear to ancient Greece, where one of the architects of democracy says that; Democracy is not possible in an area larger than you can hear the herald shouting from the square! In other words, democracy is not applicable within a social area that is larger than that people can maintain steady relationships with each other, to the extent that the area is larger, democracy does not have the opportunity to function as it was intended, but turns to being about oligarchy in the representative political system.

The area where democracy can function can be about a smaller local community, a village, a residential area or a residential block, it can be about an association, a company and not least about a workplace in the world of public administration.

Where the very point of democracy is that people in a social context have the opportunity to think together, by serially connecting their brains in order to achieve a higher collective intelligence.

"Whose goal is a mutual and common understanding, a goal that can only be achieved through unforced communication free from dominance", as the writer and professor Hannah Arendt describes it.

Democracy is about a way of thinking and being in relation to other people and not just an external form of decision-making, democracy is an ideology that reacts against all forms of inequality, injustice, lack of freedom and lack of solidarity.

Where the democratic mindset acts to preserve, renew and strengthen democracy in the social contexts in which I happen to be, where I dig where I stand, live as I learn and where I translate my values ​​into practical everyday reality.

Last but not least, it is about working to ensure that the basic values ​​of democracy are reflected in our organizational structures, in my immediate environment, in the association, in the workplace and in society at large.