Mass Media
Democracy, everywhere, refer to ‘rule of the people, for the people and by the people’. However, how people both as individuals or social groups interpret popular rule varies. There is a habit of using Western European or U.S versions of democracy as normative which is, somewhat, shortsighted and ethnocentric: it privileges one subjective view of democracy over all others. This is obvious since, while countries in this part of the world provide some of the best examples of democratic states and institutions, it often prevents us from recognizing that the world has produced a broad range of democratic states with accompanying institutions that claim to have as their guiding constitutional principles the protection and interests of all citizens.
In addition, a narrow view of idealised democracy blinds us to the fact that principles of Democracy are ideas that have become ideology; and ideologies are political by the mere fact that they serve no useful purpose outside of a social context.
At a national or international level these contexts are contained within the structural, constitutional and institutional constructs of civil society. A notion whose core ideas are continually being developed, disseminated, communicated – eventually coming to be understood to mean that, for the physical, territorial state to exist – civil society is the arena in which men become or act in a political or social manner, for some common purpose, through the use of means that are political in purpose and function; and are consequential as ends, only in the context of what is social.
The dominant ideas or ideologies regarding the method of social administration or political governance define and inform the structural form that a territorial state will assume in practice and application. Democracy, as an idealised or normative form of human self-government based on unequivocal social equality, exists as a true form, perhaps, only to academics, scholars, philosophers and other social scientists.
Outside of such specialised social spheres, democracy in application is discernible as being composed of hybrids of regulative or mediated democratic principles and ideologies regarding self-government or sovereignty of individuals within the constraints of constitutions and laws that imply there exists a social contract of sorts between the individual and the political state – by mere virtue of fact that he or she is born into, or live within, the territorial state. Thus, the first and irrevocable bond of the individual to the state is one of civil obligations.
What makes a democratic state representative, participatory or deliberative in structure or purpose – and so, perhaps, more desirable and different from other forms of state government, is that democratic principles can only be derived from social conditions in which individuals are first held to be sovereign beings, in the eyes of Constituted Laws designed to regulate the social or civil realms of human activity.
Without the means to socially and widely advocate, propagate, disseminate or communicate notions of the Greater Good for the Greatest number democracy begins to falter. Many have pointed out that it is Man’s ability to communicate, control and develop various means of communication and of communicating ideas as symbols that distinguishes him from other animals. And, as a social and political animal, man the rational animal has placed himself at the top chain. His ability to rationalize serves as justification for this particular state of affairs.
The top-down hierarchical rational approach places two significant social means of communicating – Science (Natural) and Religion (Super-Natural) – neither of which matters much, except that they both rely heavily on symbols imbued with individualised, specialised and symbolic meanings (useful in specific contexts) as aid useful in communicating what each perceives to be reality or truth. Outside of the social and political contexts in which they are developed such symbols can become meaningless natterings – much as Latin was to the average person of the Middle Ages.
It was the scribes and the interpreters of symbols who held the keys to the development of speech as a powerful social and political tool. This was something that any countless shaman, witch-doctor or blood-thirsty tyrant knew, understood and utilised – on relatively small scales – up until Greek Philosophers set about examining, classifying and codifying the nature and structure of the state as a social entity in the service of men.
And so, within this sense of being an individual within a greater collective men find themselves bound to act in a manner that benefits both the individual and the collective good of the social structure, regardless of which group or association he may find himself placed.
31/01/2022 17:09:13 -0500