Article
If You Want to Co-Design Democracy, Leave the Bubble
by Jan Schiele
It’s dizzy this weekday and I decide to commute to work taking Berlin’s often praised public transport. And yes, like R.E.M. states in “Übahn”, I have the feeling that is changing me. It’s changing me, because it reminds me of what plurality in security really feels like on a daily basis. Some would claim, that less and less people share these feelings. That democracy’s fundament is supposedly crumbling, because it can’t compete with the simple messages of propagandist’s attempts to separate us. But, is that really the case? And how can we all make sure this won’t happen?
Here in S-Bahn 42, everyone is exposed to one another, accepted and questioned in the same way: What do you do? What do you believe in? To whom or to what do you belong to? And it becomes obvious that community and democracy is an unsettling and at the same time comforting messy muddle of outer and inner perceptions, beliefs, feelings and actions.
Since “democracy is always a mess, it is the other side of the coin of freedom”, (Prof. Stein Ringen) how can people’s baselines towards accepting this pluralistic mess be shifted? Could simplistic propaganda lose its impact on people, if we learn to embrace the complexity of a political system, protect and alter it at the same time?
Our projects at Lucid always motivate specific peer groups to face this complexity and contribute in defining new ways of collective responsibility and action. We always try to understand as much as possible of what’s really going on, and through involved peers we access the door to communities’ and societies’ mindsets and biases. We also consider these process as the start of involvement into change processes. Outside our laboratories though, we too often face a strong “top-down” division between so called thought leaders and “us” when it comes to democracy.
This reminds me of October’s Innocracy Summit in Berlin: A venue that summoned supporters, promoters and patrons of democracy to discuss its future. In contrast to my commuting experience I found myself in a bubble of likeminded people with few differences in social status, education and profession. Among them were true fighters against democratic regression, like Márta Pardavi from Hungary. Most workshops circled around how to protect and develop open exchange and democracy, including the mindsets needed to involve democracy’s main drivers: “the people”. But, one urgent question of many participants kept mostly unanswered: how will people feel, hence get emotionally involved with the pluralistic ideal? What could motivate them to act more consciously in relationship to communities and societies? During the summit these “people” were not present to be asked.
We at Lucid provide impact-focused solutions to peers involved in SDG endeavors. Facing the diversity among people involved in global projects, we insist on bursting the bubbles and treating everybody equally as experts on the cause. This is how we simultaneously build a project community that is based on diverse knowledge and respect from beginning on. This approach — even if done remotely — ensures that people feel informed, heard and taken seriously, eventually prepared for active open dialogue and impactful participation; the main ingredients of democracy now and in the future.
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About the author:
I am a global citizen and blessed to participate in changing the status quo of our world to a better. Everywhere I go and everyone I know inspires me to find ways to act more human and responsible in individual and interpersonal relations.
