Notes

I want to talk about political happiness or even political pleasure which immediately sounds like a really strange concept right because very few people on earth have actually experience this um but I have um and and actually I should probably start by making a confession um I actually kind of like going to meetings I mean not not you know work meetings those are uniformally horrible uh but you know some activist meetings and some activist meetings are also horrible uh but sometimes they're really great um sometimes you go to a meeting and it just fills you of amazing sense of of life and possibility and it makes me wonder what it would take to have a world where that's what the experience of politics could actually be like um you know there are places where that's that's actually the case um I lived in Madagascar for a few years and and people there actually liked going to public meetings so it was fun um there's certain reasons for that that um are hard to reproduce there's a very ancient tradition of rhetoric that people really enjoyed um people say yeah if you go to a meeting and there are people who are really good at rhetoric you know um you see them kind of going at each other in all these subtle and indirect ways it's really fun um we don't have that here um in some places in indigenous movements in Latin America sometimes they have 14-hour meetings which even I can't imagine going to a 14-hour meeting uh but people stay because they actually enjoy it everybody gets their say [Music] um and and so it made me think well what is it that I actually like when I'm enjoying a meeting there's a sense of common purpose um there's a sense that you trust the people around you um but the reason you trust them is because you're all dedicated to solving a problem you know Democratic process and process is a very important word on the sort of um anti-authoritarian left uh because it stands for a sort of consensus process that's been gradually developed over over the years and this kind of Confluence between feminism anarchism certain spiritual Traditions but when you see really good process it means that people are situation they're kind of in problem solving mode um moving towards a consensus um and consensus doesn't mean unanimity also it means coming up with a creative solution that nobody violently objects to um it's a process of getting there uh that that's critical and and so you go to problem solving mode and when you're in problem solving mode your differences actually aren't so much a problem but they're a resource because obviously if you have 25 people who are all exactly the same they're not going to have be as well able to solve a problem as 25 people with very different perspectives um and part of the pleasure I find is a certain kind of Abandonment of self which comes from a trust in others that that other people are actually sometimes smarter than you you are or that the group as a whole becomes this kind of collective mind which is smarter than you are it's a very interesting thing because you know you bring people together in certain circumstances the collectivity becomes much stupider than any individual member um there are other what process is about is bringing people together in such a way they actually become smarter than any individual member um and and there's something wonderful about sort of saying well you know maybe my point of view isn't all that important you know I I could speak but I don't have to part of the whole idea of process is that you can block you can or you can demand that other PE which means veto or you can make other people hear your point of view if you want to but that means you don't have to sometimes you just let go and and that's a lot of where the pleasure comes from um and of course that's exactly the form of pleasure of sort of Abandonment of self that authoritarians fascists militarists also take advantage of and perverse ways um sort of losing yourself to the mass abandoning your will um in that case to that of some authoritarian charismatic leader uh but it can also be a profoundly Democratic experience if you do it voluntarily knowing that at any moment you don't have to um so I wonder how is that experience reproducible what are the conditions where democracy itself could be an experience like that for people who participate in it um because certainly that's nothing like what politics is like for most people which is why most people hate it um politics is not a matter of collective problem solving uh politics is certainly not a matter of mutual trust um and it's certainly not pleasant it's not fun well in thinking about this I thought I thought about the idea of democracy um what we're trying to do is create a genuinely Democratic process one that could ex exist in a free Society where there's no structures of coercion so you can't compel a minority to go along with a majority uh decision that's why you have to have consensus um now it's interesting that the people who created the systems that we now think of as Democratic and I'm most familiar with framers of the American Constitution most people don't know that um nowhere in the constitution does it say anything about America being a democracy um in fact the people who created that document hated democracy they're expressly against it if you look at I'm I'm not making this off if you read the um introductory speech to the constitutional conven vention you know it says we've got a problem there's way too much democracy um um a lot of the state constitutions allow really strong Democratic elements it's going to overwhelm everything we need to we need to contain this um I mean we should allow a little bit of democracy keep people happy but like we really need to um Tamp down the threat of too much democracy um that's why they put together that elaborate system of checks and balances that's what it's for um there was a Str process whereby starting in the early 19th century a franchise was extended uh people running for office suddenly started call some of them started calling themselves Democrats and this happened in America it also happened in France eventually here in the UK um and winning elections uh so suddenly everybody started calling themselves Democrats even though it had been a bad word before and system Republican systems that were essentially created to contain democracy got renamed democ democracy um the question I find very interesting is why they had to do that what was it even though democracy had been used only as a term of abuse before people liked the idea and people still do um there seems to be this desire and if de democracy is anything it's it's this idea that people should be able to manage their own Affairs even if we're not sure exactly how it's possible and I think that lingers to this day I mean if you think about Americans um you know we're always told that democracy just means electing politicians to run a government right but most Americans well you know they hate politicians they're kind of iffy about the whole idea of government yet they love democracy well surely that means democracy just means something else to them even if it's a sort of Ideal or possibility of something that's not completely realized or realized perhaps only in their ability to occasionally kick politicians out um so what would it take to actually um create bring that ideal to realization well the first thing I think is you have to look back at the original discussions around the Constitution they're very revealing because often these guys were disarmingly honest um the first thing they said is well we can't have democracy by which they meant popular participation in government direct democracy especially government by popular assemblies um we can't have that because we have inequality of wealth um John Adams for example he just set it out majority rule we can't have majority rule we have one or two million people with wealth and property and about 9 million people with none what do you think they're going to do if they all get the vote I mean they're first thing they're going to do they're going to cancel all the debts then they'll redistribute the land we can't have this um and they also made a rather compelling argument that historically if you have direct democracy it generally tends to lead to unrest there's factions there's war um they made the argument that people poor people are sort of used to following orders so they'll just follow charismatic leaders because that's all they know how to do um or if they don't do that it's even worse um so it's going to lead to tumult violence tyranny and you know it's not like they didn't didn't have something of a point because the historically there are a lot of cases where that did in fact happen but it brings up the question is if they are right perhaps what would be required in order to have a participatory genuine democracy that people see as their ultimate vision of what democracy should be is precisely a more egalitarian society I mean they didn't imagine this was possible um but that sense of possibilities I think is incredibly important um because essentially when we think of Creative Solutions to world problems we tend to think within barriers and walls that are ultimately created by violence um and it's a kind of a a violence which is the most effective forms of violence are the kinds that you don't even know are there um because you don't like to think about violence so we sort of Imagine them as just sort of structural features of reality um I think something that really brought this home to me was in the 80s there was this comedian named Sam Kennison who it had this used to shock people by having this sketch making fun of Oxfam type charity appeals on late night television um and his big line was he was saying like they're asking us to send these people food uh why don't they send them U-Hauls I I mean I mean you know and he started shouting like look at you guys you're living in a desert go to where the food is um you know as this had never occurred to them right um and you know I wanted to say to him like Sam that's why we have border guards actually most people would go to the food where the food is if there wasn't some guy who was actually there to shoot them if they tried but we don't like to think about that W like to think about the fact that the same guys who are sending the charity and laughing at the comedian are actually paying taxes to pay guys who have guns and there's all these imaginary lines drawn around the world with not so imaginary weapons you know protecting them and making sure nobody crosses um to give an example I mean we talked about the intractable problems of of global poverty I I really think that Creative Solutions are not lacking I mean we talk about it as if the big problem is we need to come up with better ideas how do we solve these terrible intractable problems we can't think of ways well that's only if you think within the walls that are created by these structures that we don't like to think are there um given a obvious example in the same vein um all right let us imagine if we're talking about the problems of poverty in the global South let us imagine that all of those lines were erased we decided overnight um no more border controls everybody can live wherever they want uh anybody in Tanzania or Honduras can go to antp or California or wherever they want to go well don't you think that the people running the wealthy countries in the world would decide then that their top priority was to come up with ways to make people in Honduras and tansania more inclined to stay there you don't think they would come up with something there's all sorts of ideas they'd come up with really fast um and this is the major thing that I I I I want to emphasize um is that there is no lack of creative interesting ideas in the world in fact it's the greatest squandered resource in the world is is all those people out there who've got them have have no Forum in which to save them or you know we're literally told to shut up or they'll be beaten or killed [Music] um there's probably no person on Earth who hasn't fought up of at least one interesting idea that might solve a problem that no one in this room would have thought of question is how to unleash that um and in order to be able to do so in order to create structures where people are encouraged rather than discouraged to come up with these Creative Solutions um we you need to create contexts where that kind of group mind um actual genuine democracy can take root and to do that we have to like challenge those invisible walls we have to like look at those structures of power more seriously than we've been doing already I think um because most people in the world go around every day thinking I know what we could do but I wish I could only say it but they can't um now to do that it's going to require two things it's going to require um not only not telling them to shut shut up but you know create a culture of democracy which oddly enough you know exists in some parts of the world and doesn't exist in most of the countries that call themselves Democratic I mean one of the things we found in Occupy Wall Street is that we had to learn everything from scratch um people don't know people in America don't know how to do democracy we never get any experience um that's slow but it can be done um the bigger problem though is that taking on those structures of inequality which essentially make it impossible um and in that I think the founding fathers are right a society divided by fundamental um inequalities of wealth is never going to be Democratic but I think that perhaps the most compelling reason to want who address those questions is precisely because it would create a society capable of actually solving the problems that the world faces [Applause] today