On sour grapes.
Aesop tells the fable of a fox that jumps under a tree trying to reach a bunch of grapes that are hanging low, although not low enough to get to them. After a couple of unsuccessful attempts, the fox says “well it doesn’t really matter, those grapes are sour anyway” and internalising this idea, it walks away. Even if one day the fox grows able to reach them, it won’t do it, those untasted grapes will be forever sour in its mind.
When I met Marina Gorbis at the Institute for the Future, we commented briefly but passionately a panel conversation on how to update democracy. Marina mentioned the concept of “outsourcing citizenship” and in doing so, she articulated beautifully an idea that I’ve been tried unsuccessfully to express before. More often that not, I get asked the question if I really think we can trust citizens to make important decisions. This valid question always makes me think of Aesop’s fox.
Since the world plunged in darkness after ancient Greece, citizens have been told that they couldn’t decide for themselves. Forced during the middle ages and convinced since the 18th century, we have outsourced our citizenship, our thinking. We’ve abdicated our most important responsibility: that of deciding our destiny.
As a consequence, two processes have unfolded. The first one is that, just like the fox, we’ve internalised the notion that we are not capable of making those decisions ourselves and happily give someone else the task and then go on to suffer the consequences.
The second process that takes place is that we’ve built institutions that frame and enhance this outsourcing. As a consequence, our system is concerned with the game amongst professional citizens instead of providing the means, resources, institutions and norms for all citizens to fully participate in the game. Reducing participation to voting, and setting it for once every couple of years, is probably the most blatant example.
What would have happened if the conversation between Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton, Jay instead of being about how to divide in order to moderate passions in decision-making; would have been on how to educate a responsible, engaged, participatory citizenship able to make those decisions?
They designed a technology for governing ourselves based on the ideal of ensuring that citizens could decide between the best possible set of options. I incessantly imagine what would have happened if they had designed a technology based on the ideal of ensuring citizens could collaborate in the design of the best possible options.
The question is not wether I believe citizens can be trusted, but how do we design processes that produce that trust and responsibility through educating, informing, opening. We trust a jury of peers to follow a judge’s instructions and decide to send or not a man or a woman to jail for life and in some states even to their deaths; but we choke when we think about a group of peers pondering together with experts and deciding an annual budget?
We the people will never know that we know until we shed over 2000 years of history and start reaching out for those grapes. It will be a long and trying process but one that we simply can’t afford not to undertake. Hamilton in the introduction of The Federalist Papers says:
“It seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”
We are at a turning point in history; new technology is placing us at that crossroads again. This time, it’s up to our generation, but it has always has been up to us.
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Marina’s fabulous book can be found here
