Radical Change or Democratic Upgrade
A Bloody revolution or a Smooth Transition
There Is No Alternative (TINA): the mental barrier
This is the most frustrating discussion I keep having when talking about democratic change.
Everyone seems to recognize at least to a certain extend that the current democratic system and its institutions are not going that well. That’s a good start…
But then when you try to move the discussion around what solutions to democratic failures it quickly becomes entrenched.
As if when you start talking about a thorough reform process to address some of the major flaws, people have a preconceived idea of what that solution is even if they are not aware of it.
In a way, it is as if talking about an alternative system that does not yet exist is impossible.
For instance — if I say “we need to look at alternatives to having elected representatives as the main feature of our democratic systems” it seems that the image of direct democracy in Switzerland comes to most minds with a front load of images and objections.
First a short digression, it’s arguable how much of a direct democracy is Switzerland. From my standpoint it is a representative democracy with some elaborated features of direct participation through citizen initiatives and ‘votation’ but by no means it can be considered as a direct democracy.
Second, nowhere it is said that direct democracy is the solution anyway. There is no reason to jump the gun from representative democracy to direct democracy as if it was a binary game of options. It is as if the mind does not like vacuum. That rather than trying to build something new step-by-step it presents a final albeit feeble image that will constrain the discussion and mostly lead to a deadlock.
I’ve been to many debates along those lines — quite fascinating to watch.
And there is a major difficulty here. For me it is even a fundamental one on the path towards democratic change. We need to take this very strong mental bias into account if we want to go somewhere.
Let’s try and put a name on it first.
My friend Mike wrote here a compelling illustration presenting radical change: what seemed impossible yesterday is today’s the new reality — like braking the ‘unbreakable’ Berlin Wall.
We have to face the overused concept of ‘change” here and what makes a reality move from (science) fiction to an evidence.
If you look at it like that it’s also what happened 250 years ago when our current form of democracy became a reality. For people leaving at that time, there was simply no alternative to monarchy. But today people around the world overwhelmingly want to live in a democracy and more importantly they want more democracy rather than less.
The problem is that the vast majority of us believe that there is no alternative to the current system or when prompted to imagine such an alternative get stuck in stereotypical views around direct democracy or anarchy.
We are today confront with a similar situation as we were 250 years ago. It is not yet an evidence that there are alternatives and that the first step is to understand that what we call democracy today is only one particular form of democracy based on representation. Well, you could certainly argue how democratic it is but that’s not the point here.
Here comes the important question: if it is a mental barrier that prevents us from seeing an alternative, how do we actually move from roughly 5 to 10 % of the population believing that we need change to a majority willing to embrace it?
Can we come up with a few ideas to push people into a mindset where they can consider with an open mind key principles and features of such an alternative system?
And as importantly, how do we build an alternative model to make the old one obsolete?
