(Not) Seeing the Possibility

If we truly wanted to envision and create together a participatory democracy that enabled us to make collective decisions based on a mutual understanding of shared needs, I imagine that we'd find a way to do this.

But why don't we really want this? Why does the thought of striving for such change hardly come up? And when we consider what we imagine to be such enormous and challenging change, do we judge it as a fond dream, a foolish adventure or as a fantastic impossibility? However we may think about it, by our not believing that there's any real possibility of such change, we ensure that there will be none.

If we don't really want genuine democracy … this is probably because we're heavily conditioned by dominant societal beliefs and unconscious assumptions not to see the possibility.

Carried predominantly through the education system and the corporate mass media, we are conditioned by views about ourselves, our world, and our place in it—views promoted by those who, consciously or unconsciously, think they have an interest in maintaining things as they are. To a large degree, “our” beliefs are shaped by others, and we're led to think that authority and power exist outside of ourselves. We've become used to our relative advantages and comforts, and we maintain our expectations about what we think is possible, and not possible, in this world.

Conditioned into disempowerment, perhaps we must appreciate the scope of this before we can imagine what liberation might look like.

One place to start is by examining our judgments and beliefs when we consider the prospect of political change. Judgments and beliefs are like gateways through which our awareness must pass, moving into contact with feelings that we habitually avoid and ignore, and where a lot of our energy is tied up—in anxiety, frustration, anger and fear. (For more on going beyond judgment into the underlying feelings and needs, check out the work of the Center for Nonviolent Communication at www.cnvc.org)

Embracing our resisting judgments and beliefs allows us to open the gates of our conditioning and liberate the creative energy that's been trapped within.

Although getting in touch with the desire for such transformative change may not easily occur when we hardly see a possibility of how to achieve it, our experience of actually wanting it may just be what calls that possibility into being.

And, if the potential exists within us to create a mature form of democracy, then one might presume that setting our attention—and intention—there would call this into being sooner than if we were to stay turned away from the possibility.

As a critical act of social evolution, our moving from a superficial to a deep democracy would be a cultural rite of passage for humanity, and mark our spiritual transition from adolescence to adulthood.

Perhaps this is as inevitable as it is necessary.

What do you see?