Probably a form of radical democracy will be the next step humanity is ready to take. How will we know when this step is being produced? We need signs. One strong sign will be when the administration of meaning ceases to lie in the hands of elites, especially of political elites. Representative democracy represents what is reactionary about our times. But direct democracy will not come about through any brusque revolution, led by individuals, since it is, by definition, a cultural process where the majority begins to claim and share social power. When this occurs, the parliaments of the world will be what the royals of England are today: an onerous adornment from the past, an illusion of continuity.
Uruguayan-American writer
Jorge Majfud (born 10 September 1969) is a Uruguayan-American professor and author, widely recognized as one of the most significant Latino American intellectuals.
From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)
La globalización mestiza después de la crisis mundial/ La República newspaper (February 2003)
Before the great civil revolution there will be a deepening of the crisis of this obsolete order. This crisis will happen in almost all areas, from the political order to the economic, passing through the military. The Superpower is nowadays very fragile due to its military resources, with which it has mined the most strategic weapon of ancient diplomacy […] it won’t be able to resist an increasingly hostile context because its economy, base of its military power, will weaken in inverse proportion. Today it’s able to win any war, with or without allies, but the successive triumphs won’t be able to save it from a progressive erosion. The immediate result will be great global insecurity, although it will be overcome with the civil revolution. In this moment breaking point, the West will debate between greater military control or civil disobedience, which will be silent and anonymous, without leaders or warlords.
What is at stake today is not only protecting the West against the terrorists, home-grown and foreign, but — perhaps above all — protecting the West from itself. The reproduction of any one of its most monstrous events would be enough to lose everything that has been attained to date with respect to Human Rights. Beginning with respect for diversity. And it is highly probable that such a thing could occur in the next ten years, if we do not react in time.
"Teología del dinero" Bitácora, magazine, La República, Uruguay (13 November 2002)
The relationship that in our time unites us with Money is completely abstract. That’s where our society resembles to the one in the Middle Ages: we fear a symbolic and invisible entity, like men feared God thousands of years ago. The stock exchange changes without our participation. Between the stock and us there’s a theology of money called “economy” that, in general, is in charge of rationally explaining something that doesn’t have more reason than it’s symbolic power.
In our Post era, a new phenomenon has emerged expressing this new associative will of the species: I mean the super-networks of communication [Internet]. On this I conceive two images, one enthusiast and another disappointed: I see Gea as a body (the Biosphere) and as a mind or spirit (the Exosphere); the human creatures would be the neurons and the electronic networks the dendrites. Okay, an autistic geopsychology, full of traumas, and other psych pathologies. But let's not say that we already lack the means to understand each other.