“Participation: Democracy is built and maintained through individual participation, yet society is structured to discourage it.
And ours is the most structured of civilizations. Forty-hour work weeks. Work breaks calculated to the minute. Weekends measured for recuperation. Various specific leaves for sickness and giving birth. Set holiday periods. Official days of celebration or mourning. When it’s all added up and the time to eat, copulate, sleep, and see families is included, twenty-four hours have been accounted for.
The only built-in space of time for individual participation is a fixed period for voting, which probably averages out to an hour a year. The only time society formally organizes extended participation is over matters of violence. (Military service or when a judge orders convicted criminals to do community service.)
Why is the function which makes democracy viable treated as if it were expendable? Or rather, why is it excluded by being reduced to a minor activity requiring the sacrifice of time formally allotted to other things?
Nothing prevents up from revising the schedule to build in four or five hours a week for public participation. Our failure to do something like this is a statement either about the state of the democratic ethic or about the real nature of power in our society.”
Excerpted from: Saul, John Ralston. The Doubter’s Companion. New York: The Free Press, 1994.
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