"No, you believe that it makes no difference in which country and among what people the rights of Roman citizens are violated: wherever this happens, it affects the freedom and standing of all citizens equally."
- Cicero : In Verrem II.5 in "Cicero Political Speeches" trans. D. H. Berry
Do you believe in Democracy? A simple question, but a question which needs a complicated answer. Why ? I will ask then, what is Democracy ? Are we that sure of the unicity of the concept, when using the word ? No body is certain. There is something we need to investigate before jumping to Pros and Cons : the nature of the concept.
Is democracy, or should it be, the reign of the people ? If you think so, I will only make a simple comment : you are in a real trouble. You can't then observe the real paradox of this horrible regime that the "reign of people" is. At the individual level, there is superficial conception of authority, that may hurt the exterior other. No, democracy is not the simple act of giving power to the simple citizen, in the plural version.
My first attempt to explain my view will be based on this truth : when defending the above version, you don't believe in democracy, but in the modest popular explanation of it. This is what I will call the "Word-to-Word Explanation Syndrome" or WWES. Unfortunately, WWES affects every type of domain in our life. May be I will dedicate a concise and precise article to it in the future.
With the evidence of WWES, I will propose this question : Do you believe in a version of Democracy where power doesn't belong to the people ? This weird question is the key of my current article : Me, I do !
Are you ready to observe this possibility? I think it is time to be. Democracy is not about voting, or insulting some politician, or saying you are free to choose. In fact, choices in democracy should be filtered : no minority should be persecuted or descriminated due to the number of votes. That's what I call Democracy : whatever was your ethnic group or your intellectual type of thinking, you should be safe, if those specification are not to conspire about democracy itself or about the right to live, to work, to possess or to express harmless ideology.
Democracy starts with the legislation. That's why, I ask every person to read the constitution of the United States and the famous Declaration of Independance. There is some charming concepts there. However, nothing is perfect. Perfect doesn't exist.
But if the people of our fictious nation are so fascinated with some social phobias and clichés, there will be no use of law. Remember the interpretation of these revolutionary texts mentioned above in the United States of the XIX century : when said : "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...", the explanation by the average white man of that time is : "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all white men are created equal..." and there is a very inspiring coïncidence : the DEMOCRAT party of the era was the racist one !
That's how, the relative context of the era affects the comprehension of the concept... People are equal unless the explanation make them so.. This simple and well-known example demonstrates that the problem is not about law in general (except for some countries like Iran or Saudi Arabia, where civil rights are not something else than the extreme explanation of a religion) but is about education. When no education is offered, when no tradition is made, you can't imagine what is the next type of extremist you will need to fight.
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