Bruce Bisset: Our world is collapsing already

Bruce Bisset.

If democracy is broken or at least badly tarnished, as I suggested last week, then before the wheels fall off completely we must find ways of restoring it, else we risk a future where the rule of the corporations is absolute.

A risk compounded by the growing anti-system movement, where people are drawn to believe if they "stand outside" governance they can eventually force change - a stance I find naive and dangerous.

Yes, surprising as it sounds a significant number of people who don't vote choose not to because they see the act of voting as "validating" a system they have no faith in. The theory goes that the more who don't participate, the less credible the system becomes until it collapses from sheer lack of popular support.

There are celebrity admirers of this idea (like Russell Brand, although he has now recanted) and it's certainly flavour of the decade among the young intelligentsia who are smart enough to know the system needs overhauling and clever enough to think they can derive a solution no one's thought of before.

But perhaps - and this is deja vu for those of us old enough to remember - not wise enough to realise that following a separatist path to a new model merely plays into the hands of those who benefit from retaining a broken system no one is willing to fix. And it is those beneficiaries who currently wield the power, and will continue to wield it, regardless.

So that route can only end in blood. (As, again, it did last time. This time it would be worse.)

Besides, it's inherently nonsense. Shouting "power to the people" is only another way of saying "democratic rights" - if, that is, you believe every person has the right to be heard and respected for their views. That's exactly what democracy delivers: one person, one vote.

So the idea of reinventing the wheel by retreating to localised communes, separating from the greater system before slowly federalising into a new whole fails on three accounts.

First because unless you are changing to a socialist autocracy or other totalitarian regime, then regardless some improvements may evolve, this is simply democracy revisited.

Second because the existing rulers will ignore it, go round it, ride roughshod over it, or find a cunning way to undermine it depending on how significant and/or obstructive any such movement becomes.

Thirdly, there simply isn't time. The world is collapsing and fragmenting already, and for every breakthrough that hints at hope there are a dozen disasters unfolding; falling back to a "simpler time" as we plunge down the cliff just makes the fall faster and harder.

The only point on which I agree with these voteless outliers is that empowering the people is the crucial element. But if, as mounting evidence suggests, people are refusing to participate in a system that intrinsically offers them power, then there is no real hope for change, no matter how you slice it.

That said, there are a range of improvements - or at least, ideas worth exploring - being trialled in a variety of ways and in a surprising number of countries. Most are models of consensus direct democracy that aim to revitalise, not replace.

And much as I dislike the Union Jack, examining those ideas as part of a process to reform democracy would be a much better use of our time and energy than debating a new flag.

Bottom line: don't throw baby out with the blackwater. Turning the system round so it bites the hand that would shackle it is a much better idea.

That's the right of it.

- Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet.