To:    Guardian CiF
Re:    The problem with "representative democracy" is that it is not very democratic
Date: Tuesday 24 April 07

In response to a Guardian article, "Global governance as it stands is tyranny speaking the language of democracy. We need a directly elected assembly" by George Monbiot

Link to article and thread at The Guardian.
 

The problem with "representative democracy", whether national, European or global, is that it attracts and facilitates the promotion of "representatives" motivated by their natural, but more animal than human, desire to possess and exercise power (we are "prime apes", in fact, Earth's Greatest Ape, don't forget).

It is not by chance that national governments reflect very much the character and behaviour of individual human beings, with their strongly varying degrees of maturity; or rather, immaturity, since even the most mature governments (e.g. Britain's and America's) are still a very long way from possessing the degree of enlightenment and maturity necessary to get a grip of the problems now threatening to bring a premature end to our civilization, such as the Sustainability Problem (global climate change, etc) and nuclear proliferation.

What's needed is "grass-roots democracy" in which individuals "self-organize" into communities of their own choosing, which in turn self-organize and interact to form higher levels of organization, instead of society, as it is now, even in the most democratic countries, being organized essentially from the top down, by individuals with a great deal of "animal intelligence" (which is how they get to the top), but a sorry lack of human wisdom.

We (in the West, at least) have the freedom, and now the technology - the internet and biometrics (non-fraudulent personal identity being absolutely central to "real" community) - to self-organize and start replacing the power structures of the nation state, which, like the economy, are deeply rooted in our animal nature and behaviour, with structures, and an economy, rooted instead in our wiser and more enlightened, human nature.

My homepage: http://www.spaceship-earth.org