What is democracy without its promises? One of the central ones is this: People can free themselves from the mistakes of the past and develop into new kinds of folks. Government won't interfere in the process and, in fact, will try and facilitate the process by providing security and mediate conflicts that might pull apart the civil culture. This animating myth, that lays at the core of this promise, means each generation needs to find its own freedom through its own experience. The ideal isn't transmitted through birth but through its experience discovered by an expansion of both imagination and intelligence.

Jefferson wrote, "no generation has the right to bind another."

Freedom is the most difficult dream yet conjured in the depths of human beings. It can turn dangerous because anything less than its attainment can lead to a variety of imprisonments. A citizen who walks the tightrope between dreams and desires is in the perilous position of having to continually justify himself before huge, meaningless objects and forms of control.

"This is their freedom? But, where is mine?"

The imagination is free when it is able to fully renew understanding and the relation between things. There is a common sense of the body the intellect learns to respect. So developed, an individual notices that when collective judgement rules there is little progress. The generation that throws all the illusions over is the one that carries the spirit into the future.

Progress emerges from creative insight developed after profound contact with the reality of the society. That reality includes organizing principles, belief systems, inventions, sciences, households, infrastructures, and so forth. In other words, progress is earned. It is earned through the transformation of the person into the citizen. It is the person who experiences the jagged edges that make up a society. It is the citizen who emerges on the otherside; informed, experienced, skeptical but open-minded, with a full view of the total society and its needs.

Good citizens who learn the art of transformation guard it against the powers-at-large but use it daily in all their transactions. History is not that distant in collective memory when the powers-at-large held the secret of transformation and used it to contain populations. We, in the here and now, have to deal with professional cliques, would-be tyrants on the tips of political wings, con men on infomercials, and nutty new agers but we laugh at them rather than cower in fear of them.

The citizen acquires more responsibility as he acquires more knowledge. From a native state of alienation to the state of maturity he passes through complexity after complexity the world erects around him, down into his private sensibility. He needs, then, to understand the forces that work manipulation after manipulation through him. And he needs to understand this: Representative democracy came into being as the best problem-solving system devised out of the ruins of feudal aristocracy. The aristocracy collapsed because it was perceived as creating more problems than solving.

Does the range and depth of government develop and bring on more problems than it solves? This is not a simple question. On what foundations does the government makes its decisions? From what direction does it approach the problems? Why does it tend to converge and pull-in behind the Beltway? What are the assumptions of those who become the agents that bring this convergence to pass? Is this movement ineluctable? Each generation rises up, has its few moments in the light, then fades back into the mystery. But each generation is born into a background against which it passes its life; a background it sustains, alters, tears down, builds up. At one time this background was nature; now it is machinery and the institutions dependent on machinery.

The citizen walks through the woods and sees a variety of trees dying mysteriously around him. Over here an oak, there a spruce, now a redwood. Even though these separate witherings seem coincidental he can get the courage to dig the earth below and expose the roots to some new, emerging sun.

Each generation is born into assumptions carried in the background. Isn't it evident that it's the assumptions that win out rather than the particular generation?

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David Eide
January 24, 2014