People and Democracy

"People do not have ideologies; ideologies have people." An ideology can give meaning to one's life, but it can also take it away.

Democracy allows you break the law when convenient and law is supposed to be the minimum of morality. Is it acceptable to kill another human being? I think the majority of people would say no. Yet we need to have police and army with people who are willing to break this rule from time to time. There are shadows of doubt and blurry lines even in such seemingly obvious questions.

It is said that historically, people lived in caste systems that are nevertheless different than the ones we nowadays know from e.g. India. Before, the castes used to be a flexible system, where children would go into apprenticeships based on their recognized skill-sets and talents, compared to the rigid "modern" caste system that distributes roles based on ancestry.

The second point is that all castes carried equal importance. An office worker who issues road plans and a road worker who builds roads are equal in getting the road project done. They need each other to get the job done. They still do, however I believe there exists a societal imbalance in perceiving working in an office to be "better off" compared to working on the road (pronounced in higher pay, reputation etc.)

I think the system in modern democracies is better, as the background of the person seemingly doesn't matter. However, it still operates on the idea that what children want might not be what they need and, counter-intuitively, it doesn't provide them with any guidelines once they are forced to make a decision about their further education or finding a job.

According to Plato, democracy ranks fourth out of five governmental regimes he described. Under this regime, anyone is free to do what they want. However this freedom must be coupled with discipline to make something useful out of it, otherwise we risk running from one thing to another as soon as something starts going poorly for us and never getting anything done.

That's not to say one shouldn't try multiple mutually exclusive pathways (i.e. careers or partnerships) during their lives, however there should be a progression (preferably in the form of gain of experience) over time and the eventual admission that we chose a "good enough" or even the "best" path for ourselves.

Contrary to that, if freedom is taken as an excuse to do nothing, then the life of an individual who assumes such a stance is bound to become exactly that - nothing. A "nothing" likely ridden by anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts.

Given that we live in a quite extraordinary time where a lot of things temporarily stopped still in our lives, we were given the opportunity to focus on ourselves. Now is the time to consider what do we stand for, to check whether we are going where we want to go and to make ourselves a bit more truthful (and less despicable!) during the process.

It's time to get up and to get after it and to get it done. You already know what "it" is.