Democracy: Choosing to Serve

DEMOCRACY

CHOOSING TO SERVE
The more participatory a social system is, the more total its control
is because the individual identifies herself with his role within the
system. In other words, a democratic structure is the most efficient
way yet developed to integrate individuals into a social system, to
make them feel that they are essentially a part of a social machine.
Partial rebellions, in the form of "radical "issues, which use
democratic methods or demand more justice, equality or
participation in democratic processes become lubricant for the
machinery of social control.
Those who rebel against the social context in its totality as they
confront it in their lives are called hooligans, delinquents, enemies of
"the People". They cannot be tolerated in a democratic system (not
even the consensus process systems of certain so-called radical and
anarchist groups) because their actions undermine the ideological
basis of such systems, by showing that individual freedom grows out
of self-determined activity, not any sort of decision-making process.
Radical groups will merely expel such troublemakers, but within the
larger social context, they must be punished, rehabilitated or
destroyed if caught.
Democracy is never anarchic, no matter how direct. Democratic
decisions are not the decisions/actions of free individuals. They are
merely choices made between the options offered by the social
context, choices separated from the actions of individuals and used
to control those actions, to subject them to the will of the group, the
society. So to choose to participate in democratic processes is to
choose to serve, to be a slave to a will outside of oneself. No
free-spirited individual would accept the will of the majority or the
group consensus as a way of determining how to live anymore than
she would accept the will of a dictator or the central committee. I do
not merely a want a say in how society creates my life. I want my life
to by my own to create as I desire.