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You cannot fix it all on your own
Why our milieu and institutions must change
From: Too Dumb for Democracy?
$1.90
Chapter Nine focuses on the personal effort to make better political decisions. The author argues that individuals cannot and should not be expected to do the work of making rational, autonomous political decisions on their own, as making good decisions requires institutional support to encourage those decisions and to translate them into outcomes that inspire people to keep making them. This means that leaders must be responsive to citizens, and that requires building regular, inclusive, and meaningful participatory democratic mechanisms into communities and all levels of government. To achieve this, we need to adapt our milieu and our institutions to facilitate more citizen-led leadership. This chapter explores topics such as “democracy washing”, individual and collective self-determination, universal justice was not achieved with the expansion of liberal democracy. A strong environment that protects democracy through better citizen decision-making needs at least four key features: slowness, abundance of time, deep diversity, and equality. Each of these is valuable on its own, but together they form a powerful assemblage that could transform not only how we do politics but how we live.
