Mediocrity has installed itself: it’s necessary to shout, insult, denounce, disguise and scandalize to call people’s attention and to accomplish the craved adhesion of the citizens. However, all of this evaporates in a matter of minutes and that’s when we realize everything is still the same and that it is necessary to rethink some issues such as our institutions’ design.
Future is hope, but Argentina is used to repeating the past. Political processes are born all grown up, with institutional promises that are left aside, which go through a regression back to childhood. Initial consensus slowly degrades into irreconcilable divisions.
Big issues such as security, education, retired people, social exclusion, prisons or infrastructure remain on the agenda and are rescheduled year after year. Fear paralyzes us because every now and then there’s a crisis derived from the lack of real solutions. In the last 50 years, we have seen people worrying more about abrupt changes than themselves.
It should be different. Driving to the future without looking the rear-view mirror and leaving fear aside to plant hope because that is that is the way in which societies grow.
Philosophy presents us 2 models, which we have insisted on in the last 10 years.
The “concentrated-descendent” model states that fundamental decisions must be adopted by an authority and adopted by the citizens
It considers that the world is populated by sectors that fight in an irreducible way and where agreement is considered as betray towards the flags that guide the battle.
That produces a society with permanent opposition and the solution to the problem emerges when one of the positions imposes itself to the other. Current technology helps to polarize because everything leads us to relate with those who think alike.
But opposition is not simultaneous but successive. Hence, change cycles are generated, which make different decisions arise, hampering public policies. The group that arrives is legitimized by taking distance from the one that preceded it and by announcing a new founding period of the republic.
The constant re-foundation generates a scheme of cyclical behavior that leads to the repetition of the crisis, because everything that is done is destroyed in order to start over. It is like the myth of Sisyphus who was condemned to take a stone to the top of the mountain, and when he arrived, the stone fell and everything went back to beginning and started again.
In the “decentralized-ascending” model, decisions arise from a basic agreement between citizens who decide to live in society and ascend their decision making to the bodies that exercise authority, who are their delegates.
Change is inevitable because technological acceleration, environmental risk and globalization make it impossible for a person or group to predict what will happen. That is why plans come together with great announcements and fails with great silences.
Governance is knowing how to manage the diversity of interacting factors. The multiplicity of nationalities, beliefs, political ideas, economic factors, require flexibility and not rigidity.
The “ascendant” model is based on consensus on basic principles, leaving great flexibility for citizens to adapt freely to changes.
Consensus is not that everyone thinks like the decision maker, or that we all think alike. It is, instead, that the decision arises from a process where everyone interacts.
Therefore, the 21st governance’s institutional reform requires changes.
The first is to promote complex cooperation between different people, creating meeting places of dissimilar positions, so that there is a prolonged cross-linking in times where dialogue replaces the dialectic.
The second is the decentralization of institutions, so that there is a multiplicity of decision centers. Along this line we can find federalism, regions, agencies, intermediate organizations. It is the enormous wealth of human capital in action.
The third is to understand that citizens of the 21st century are no longer passive citizens who only vote, but they are active, they participate and have the capacity to veto the most splendid initiatives that come from the central authority.
The fourth is to guide through values:
Freedom, for all those who live conditioned by the abusing power or discrimination.
Equality, generating an ethic of the vulnerable.
Solidarity, taking care of the common good and nature.
It is not fear or division that leads to progress and that is why it is the task of this generation to defend the rule of law and make a Copernican investment in the institutional system.