This post is a summary of a article published at Co-Intelligence.org and was written by Frances Moore Lappé and Paul Martin Du Bois in 1992. The title is above.
Around the world people are throwing off tyranny. Meanwhile, here in the United States it feels like democracy is not working. Public debate gets nastier, and our democracy seems stymied in the face of mounting social problems.
Now many people feel that the political process itself, driven by wealth and media professionals, hold citizens in contempt, so a cycle of disaffection has begun, feeding on itself : the more citizens withdraw from public participation, the more politicians ignore them. The more irresponsible the politicians act, the more citizens withdraw in anger and hopelessness.
But, we from Co-Intelligence Institute NGO believe this self-destructive cycle arises from an incomplete understanding of democracy. More important than its forms ( like elections ), democracy needs to be viewed as a way of life, a civic culture in which people creatively participate in public life.
Our research has encourage us : we have found that millions of americans are awakening to one of the key insights of living democracy, a very simple truth, today`s problems can not be solved without the involvement of the people most directly affected. Solutions to social problems can not just be fabricated by computers and experts. Wise, workable solutions need the insight that emerge from diverse experiences. They depend on the ingenuity of those involved, who knows the problems most intimately.
To act on their values, citizens need power, but to many americans, power is bad, it is always corrupt, coercive, self-serving. But in living democracy, power is seen as a dynamic, enabling relationship, not a one-way force. The concept of power becomes one of mutually expanding horizons.
When power is understood as derived from relationship among people, not from authority over people. Each person`s action influences the actions of others. From this insight it follow that no one is ever completely powerless. A relational approach to power alters the practice of politics, making it more interactive. Living democracy sees power in terms of enabling relationship.
Citizens of a living democracy are not born. We learn the arts of democracy. The democratic arts are capacities that citizens cultivate in order to act with power, wisdom and effectiveness in public life. There are dozens of them. We find it useful to place them into four categories: communication in public dialogue, the resolution and management of conflit, thinking and group facilitation.
Public dialogue requires conscious commitment to exploration: to asking why, why do you and I think as we do and toward what ends? It requires attention to creating an environment ( even mutually agreed upon rules to insure full participation ) in which differences are used as occasions for examining underlying assumptions and sources of information.
Democracy requires that we learn to create systems of accountability, to ask those difficult questions, and to expect and get answers from those we empower to work for our communities.
In living democracy, citizens are not seeking more government and no less government, they are developing appropriate and effective roles for government. Made accountable to citizens` real concerns. These citizens know that they don`t have a democracy. Democracy is something that they are doing.
Nastier - more unpleasant, or disgusting, or bad-tempered.
Stymie - prevent or slow down the progress of.
Hopelessness - loss of hope in regard to a particular situation, feeling of passive abandonment of oneself to fate.
Insight - ability to understand the truth about something.
Contempt - feeling that a person or thing is worthless or unworthy of respect.
Accountable - responsible for your actions and expected to explain them.
