|
The French and
Dutch referendums showed that masspeople are discontent with the
present situation and the present leadership. But discontent and
voting against leaders cannot change the world as I wrote in my
60th
Letter of an Autonomous Thinker.
Discontent needs individualisation, activity of masspeople and a
long term goal for a better world.
Discontent
without any idea how to leave the precarious situation of masspeople
leads to pessimism (withdrawal from political activity). Even worse
is the reasoning that “the others” are deceiving us and that we
need better leaders. In the end that can lead to populist leaders
who just as the old elite in the first place are interested in the
well-being of the own group. Hitler, Pinochet, Kemal Ata Turk and
also Putin and Berlusconi are such leaders. About strongmen I wrote
already in The fourth Chapter of
my book “About Violence and
Democracy”.
Individualisation
forces masspeople to think for themselves. But when solutions have
no future this can also lead to disappointment and withdrawal from
the political arena. This withdrawal does not support the rise of
a new elite but this kind of isolated individualisation leads to alienation, hedonism and in
the end to the disintegration of society.
By the way, voting is not an individual activity, it is to a great
height controlled by the sitting political elite. People are asked
to vote about complex processes but the elected interpret the voting
results only in favour of their own policy. Many politicians
explained the heavy defeat in the referendum about the European
Constitution as a step forward on the way to a United Europe.
Individual activity that
is not controlled by higher powers is needed for a positive
change of our society. It
is founded on the idea that solutions only can be implemented by the
continuous and lasting activity of masspeople against leaders.
Autonomous activity gets rid of the emptiness of most political mass
activity. The number of masspeople who are member of political
parties has indeed decreased sharply but new methods to become
political active have not yet come forward. Individual activity in
small and temporarily groups can become a binding factor in the
massworld that contributes to the coming into existence of a new
world without any elite.
A
long term purpose is also
needed.
The elite has the conservative
goal to preserve the existing situation in which it has an
advantage over the masses in the field of power and wealth.
Masspeople should always carry in the back of their mind the progressive
goal of a new world in which all people have equal status, in
which privileged elites will not anymore exist.
All mass activity that does not in some way contribute to the coming
into being of a new society confirms only the organisation of the
present society in which leaders are living on a privileged eliteworld that is
far apart from the often harsh massworld.
In the end it all
boils down to one sentence. Fundamental change only occurs when masspeople
do not want to live anymore on the way they are living now and
when elitepeople cannot live
anymore their former life because masspeople intrude the private
living sphere of the rich and powerful.
Joost van Steenis (June 23 2005)
|