Tom Walker shared:
Instead, some of the problems of governance
today stem from the excess of democracy . . . Needed instead, is a greater
degree of moderation in democracy. . ."
I was driving my 81 year old mother around the
other days and we were listening to the radio news. Some story of interest
came up and she said, "Why doesn't somebody do something about
that?" Which got me thinking about why somebody doesn't do something
about that. On reflection, I realized that every single day, I could find
something that somebody i.e. me or you could get
involved in and spend a number of years of our lives trying to
redress.
On reading the above quote, I saw a pattern in
which the media presents us with the problem of the day - each and every day -
to the degree that the sense of outrage cannot be sustained. In fact it
gets so bad that we cannot even remember the problems of a month ago - remember
the Asian Flu. We as citizens have been made ineffective by the sheer
volume of crisis.
So, I see two things, one few can get involved
individually because the economy demands so much from us in terms of time to
earn and two, the problems are presented so continually that it becomes almost
impossible to make a commitment to get
involved.
When elections come, all those problems get
subsumed into the spin doctors hands and we are presented with one or two major
problems i.e. the deficit or North American Free
Trade. Now, I realize I am rambling here but Tom's point was that the
elites create these situations so that the greater citizenry become paralyzed in
deciding what is a valid problem to work on. It is this paralysis that I
think is one of the main results of the elites manipulation of people through
economy. If the economic manipulation was reduced by solving a large
portion of peoples economic insecurity through a Basic Income, then there is a
vast army of "somebodies" who would and could act.
