Democracy 2.0

Here’s an idea: getting rich is worthless.

Here’s another: the pursuit of wealth engenders a concept of value that devalues humanity.

Here’s the proof.

In Brazil, the world’s most closed economy, the upper-classes know that they’re paying double the going rate for their Ray-Bans, iPhones and Porsche Cayennes. But they don’t care.

The only thing that matters is having access to the cultural signifiers of their class, to the markers that distinguish them as chosen, inviolable, elite.

Money itself, therefore, is made meaningless by relativism.

The subjective construction of value is subordinated to the absolutism of the market.

These phenomena are common to all capitalist societies, but they are drawn in stark relief when, as in Brazil, a privileged group knowingly endorses the disparity between constructed (i.e. market-driven) value and intrinsic value at the expense of the remaining 95% of society.

Endorsing economic disparity in this way generally creates a feeling of complicity or helplessness within individuals that prevents them from addressing the social inequality they are tacitly perpetuating.

[I say generally because wealth also creates the conditions of leisure and education that expose people to ideologies – socialism, asceticism – that will stimulate them to create internal dissonance within the prevailing paradigm.]

Such disparity can also, from time to time, create astonishing paradoxes.

In 2012, BB King played some gigs in São Paulo. The tickets for a club show cost R$1,300 (about £450); the average monthly salary of a shop-assistant in São Paulo is about R$900.

Thus blues music, the Delta moan of poverty and oppression, was repackaged for one night as the amuse-bouche of the super-rich.

The vast majority of the entitled minority, the very richest in society, are too lamed by complicity to question the status quo.

The very poor are also prevented from speaking out because they either have no voice within the current system or believe that their foothold in society (i.e. their livelihoods or access to food and shelter) is too vulnerable to countenance opposition.

The only people in a position to change things, then, are people like you and me. People with computers and the kind of work that enables us to sit in front of them reading other people’s opinions, with full bellies and the expectation of full bellies tomorrow. We’re the ones with the freedom to think about the problem, to read about it, talk about it and to organise.

But to what end?

The only real alternative, as far as I can see, is democracy. Not the democracy we currently have, the one that has evolved to serve the interests of the minority at the expense of everyone else, but the democracy that idealists throughout history have tried to create. A better type of democracy, based on the following inalienable rights:

The right to education

The right to be free from fear

The right to food and shelter

The right to conduct one’s life free from sexual, racial or religious intolerance

The right to be heard

It’s not so very far from the one we’ve got now. And there’s no earthly reason why it shouldn’t happen properly this time. The only thing preventing it is the opposition of those who view such a change as a direct threat to their interests.

But, let us be clear for a moment, those guys are assholes.

When people suggest ideas like the Robin Hood Tax (http://www.robinhoodtax.org) or debt relief,  they are expressing their belief that our species could, by effecting a nominal redistribution of wealth, engender a universal improvement in the dignity, self-determination and potential for happiness of all human beings.

And when governments or corporations demur at such ideas with the putative justification of pragmatism, real-world politics or the need to protect sovereign economic interests, what they’re really saying is that they’re unprepared to accept any reduction in their influence over the means of production and wealth-creation.

They’re saying they won’t accept any alteration to the extent of their privilege or personal fortune, even if it’s only the change from ludicrous to merely obscene wealth.

They’re saying that they don’t give a damn about the human race.

And that’s not good enough.

It’s time for a reboot.

Democracy 2.0