Decision making like the ancient Greeks
#176
My Dear Friend of Democracy,
We know who invented the democratic state. It was the ancient Greeks.
Democracy back then was very different. It was a direct democracy in which all citizens (well, actually, it was just the men) gathered in one place to debate and determine policy.
Today's democracies are representative democracies. We are not regularly involved in the process of government.
That is a problem. We tend to judge unfairly if we do not know the difficulties governments must solve. We simplify. We blame the government. We follow populists simply because we know little about the complexity of the problems to be solved.
I recently attended a council meeting in a small village in eastern Germany. The village has fewer than 500 inhabitants, and the council consists of only six people.
It was a great pleasure to attend this meeting. No council member is a member of an extremist party. Everyone argued objectively, and everyone was interested in finding solutions. Who will get the next contract for the construction of the daycare centre? Which streets need to be renovated? Such questions were asked, decided, answered.
There, in the municipal council meeting of the small village, there was not a bit of populism. Why? Because everyone in the village knows everyone. Those who are elected are those who are believed to achieve the best for the village. And the elected work hard because they know the results are visible to all the village residents.
There is no room for populism in the politics of this village. Because populism does not make things better. And on that level, people know that. They experience it.
What does this mean for a world where populism is increasingly gaining votes?
We need to involve people more in politics. They need to see what it means to make difficult decisions. They need to see it because they have to make these decisions themselves. So, we need more direct democracy. And more subsidiarity, which means a shift to the lowest possible level of political decision-making.
Maybe, we all should move more in the direction of the ancient Greeks. Learning from the beginning means strengthening democracy.
See you in Europe,
Johannes