[1/4] Structure of politics — (direct-democracy, indirect-democracy, referendum, deliberation)

This series of text is written to picture political structure, or more broadly social structure. It hasn’t been written enough yet, and will be added further or modified in the future.

1. Concerns over direct democracy

1. Concerns over direct democracy

As we have been moving to more democratized politics along with the development of technology, there is voice that hopes to move to direct democracy. Even if we look at democracies in the modern world, indirect-democracy, in which a certain number of people is chosen in election and becomes representatives of citizens, doesn’t reflect public opinion precisely and straightforwardly. In this respect, direct democracy allows citizens to have more chance in decision-making in politics and presumably direct democracy could reflect the public opinion more precisely — this doesn’t mean that I completely agree with direct democracy because even if a large number of people have a same opinion and hypothetically it leads to an actual action of the state, it is not necessarily a right choice, not necessarily a proper choice that means the possible outcomes the decision would cause are not necessarily taken into account adequately given the complicatedness of the current politics. This time, as for reflecting public opinion in politics more directly, I take a look at the Switzerland’s referendums and the case of France in which citizens’ initiative referendum was claimed among the demonstrators in the Yellow vest movement. 

Before beginning to step into it, first I do emphasize the concerns over direct democracy. Generally saying, the world has been getting increasingly to the direction of improving democracy. I don’t think this trend is wrong and I’m not saying that I’m against democracy. But the emergence of the Internet, particularly social media, made possible the traffic of huge amount of information which, I presume,  people cannot deal with at least as of right now. That changed the world. Opinions and claims on the Internet can be powerful by being shared by its users — I understand this has positive aspects which made possible the movements such as Me Too uniting those who are willing to change society in better way, however in the meantime it allows to spread negative information such as fake news which include those posted to deceive Internet users on purpose and others which didn’t intend to, but incidentally caused by lack of understanding on the matters. Much importantly, the media literacy hasn’t developed enough among the public to live in highly rapid-informational life. This is a reason many people are stirred up on social media. In order to digest huge amount of information, we unconsciously need to do comprehensive understanding what the essential(s) of each topic is(are), how much important it is, and whether it’s worth sharing or adding comment to. Even though there are those who publicize posts stirring up others at this moment, if they are more with rational way of thinking they would not find out value in heckling. This way of thinking is not always consciously carried out, I think that if we are with more critical capabilities which presumably could be focused in compulsory education by having philosophical and critical class, we would be able to unconsciously be better at media literacy and might be able to process vast amount of information. The internet enabled citizens to come across enormous volume of information in daily life. I have an impression that people tend to focus just on small pieces of information trending then and when the next one comes up, they jump on it. They quite emotionally move on to new pieces. People tend to be quite easily swung by comments and pieces of news provoking them. In order to have politics proceed in more logically and rationally — this doesn’t mean excluding or eliminating some people, we need to comprehensively understand politics or whatever matters we have from broader viewpoint. Also, the dramatical increase of superficial information can be dealt with by thinking essentially. Even if superficially increased, the cores are the almost same. This is a reason why I emphasize the importance of being capable of comprehensively understanding. In addition to the descriptions above, I think the problem that feelings are more powerful than facts in the current world has to do with the weakness or loss of what Jacques Lacan explained in his theory.