Finally, Done...

.:Finally, Accomplished!:.

Doomed To Failure

Admittedly, despite our immersion in so-called democracy, even locally, we can’t really say that this is democracy is at work. In the Philippines alone, we have very subtle vanguards of the status quo, ranging from the police and the military, all the way to the MTRCB. Our pitiful excuse for “democracy” has been little more as a simple means for the government to placate the masses with the illusion that this is a free country when really, it’s quite far from it.

Democracy is supposedly, in its most distilled form, “the rule of everyone by everyone” (p.240), and in this very simplified way of looking at democracy is a good rule of thumb to determine the progress we have made in realizing this dream. Is democracy today truly “the rule of everyone by everyone”? A cursory look at the way things are then and especially now yields an empathic “no”. Democracy has always had the intrinsic problem of enforcing how it is for everyone to rule everyone, and at the time, modern democracy’s elegant solution was simply representation (p. 238). With representation, we had democracies being ruled by a few people, but these few people actually represent the rest of the populace, thus seemingly solving the problem. Alack and alas, this is certainly not the case at all.

It’s ironic that this “solution” also ensures that democracy in its purest form will never happen. Representation ensures that the leaders will have some measure of separation from the people they represent, thus causing a situation of alienation that is inevitable, and ironically, this “solution” actually stands contrary to the notions of democracy, thus meaning that for as long as we use it as a means of remedying the problems of democracy, we further prevent ourselves from ever achieving the ideal (p.244). This is but one facet of the problem.

The other facet is how democracy in the age of globalization needs to be reimagined, the way they reimagined it in the age of modernity, and they haven’t figured it out, thus making the dream of fully realizing democracy an unfinished one (p.237). Given the constant state of war, and the gradual destruction of borders in globalization, democracy may indeed never be truly realized…