Democracy is often a story of compromise and slow deliberations, but there’s also the certainty of knowing that when you land yourself in a difficult spot, a community of people will have your back. It’s the certainty of knowing that you’re part of a society that makes decisions together, and that takes shared responsibility to see them through.
In the third part of my monologue for democracy, I want to talk about why, as so called ordinary people, we can be misled into thinking that our interests are actually better represented by those anti-democrats and demagogues who seek to utilise our human capacity for selfishness and cruelty for their own authoritarian ends.
The answer I will begin to give may be considered by some as controversial, because it may seem to call into question the idea of truth. But before I go any further than that, I would summarise my argument as follows: It matters what story we choose to believe.
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In Yann Martel’s novel, Life of Pi, the eponymous main character finds himself on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean together with a bengal tiger, an orangutan, a zebra, and a hyena, following a catastrophic accident on a Japanese freight ship. The hyena ends up killing the zebra and the orangutan, and the tiger eventually kills and eats the hyena. Pi survives by creating a raft out of flotation devices, which allows him to separate himself from the lifeboat and the tiger. When he finally washes ashore in Mexico, he has survived at sea for 227 days.
While recovering in a hospital, Pi is questioned by Japanese Ministry of Transport officials who want to understand what caused the freight ship to sink. The officials quite understandably find Pi’s story very difficult to believe. So Pi offers them a second story in which he’s not on the lifeboat together with animals, but with other survivors from the freight ship, one of whom is his own mother. The officials soon understand that there are parallels between the two stories Pi tells them. When he’s finished, Pi points out that neither story can be proven, and neither fully explains why the ship sank. In other words, the officials have to choose which story to believe.
As I’ve said before on this podcast, I spent much of 2024 inhabiting a far-right populist information environment in order to understand the persuasive powers that have facilitated the rise of authoritarians across the globe. And while what I found there was often blatant misinformation and obvious fabrications, I also found a story and, for a while, I made an effort to believe it. It goes like this:
There are only two kinds of people in the world today: You are either a globalist or a nationalist populist. You are either a so called “anywhere”, or a so called “somewhere.”
The “anywheres” are those who have bought into and benefit from the internationalist, expat economy which says you should always be prepared to move your life to wherever there’s a job, and feel no attachment to your home town or your compatriots. Then there are the “somewheres” who, by not fitting into this model, are cast out from society to languish in the peripheries, as they eventually lose their jobs or fail to adapt to a changing economy that doesn’t see their skills, values and needs as relevant. For every useless somewhere, there’s an immigrant who can take their jobs—and they will happily work for less money. As more and more jobs disappear or become unobtainable, more and more “somewheres” are cast out to the edges of society where they are made invisible to the ruling metropolitan elites of internationalist “anywheres”.
When you find yourself inhabiting this model of thinking, then you perceive your criticism of society as a true and righteous reaction to a ruling elite that has decided that everything you believe in, from your heritage to your place in the world, is a lie and a relic of the past. Who could then blame you when you welcome those populists who say they will restore your values and reprioritise your needs over the luxury concerns of foreigners and globalists.
That overarching story is so compelling to so many people who feel left behind, that it masks those features of reality that clearly contradict it. The lies and distortions become invisible when the whole system is a fairytale. And in all places where it’s been believed, it has facilitated a politics that never really about you, and we can see it playing out in the US, a country that is right now accelerating towards disorder and chaos, and in so doing risks taking much of the world with it.
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In Life of Pi, one story describes the facts of what transpired over the course of the 227 days Pi spent on the lifeboat. The other story is metaphorical and while not true to fact, it explains and makes sense of a difficult and traumatic experience. The book posits that it matters which stories we choose to believe in, as human experience can be difficult to quantify. Between observable fact and our perception of life, there is always some degree of mystery, and that mystery is the space in which stories emerge.
As defenders of democracy try to influence where we will be this time tomorrow, it is my conviction that we must not blame or vilify those who believe the other story. We must, however, challenge that story and provide them with a better one in which they can see themselves.
Defenders of democracy must not tell a story that comforts, but rather one that provides an identity and a community for all people. They must be honest about the urgent challenges we face globally and the fact that the solutions are found in international cooperation, not in national isolation and competition. Right now, we are heading in a direction where tomorrow, more people will have less, and a very few people will have almost everything. More people will find themselves in danger of armed conflicts, of losing their social safety net, of becoming gravely ill, of not being able to pay their bills, and of not being able to keep their family safe, warm and fed. And it’s all because of a bad story.
So now you’re asking me: OK, Ted, what’s your story then? What’s the alternative? What’s the story you think we should believe in?
And the truth is I can’t be expected to provide it alone. That would be wrong. And it would be undemocratic. That’s what autocrats do. It is not the role of democrats to provide the one truth for all to adhere to and live by. For us, the story is in the grind, it’s in the belief that tomorrow will be better, that we’re only as free as the least free among us, and that progress and enlightenment is always possible if we work together.
To defend democracy right now is increasingly to defend the diminishing rights, power and influence of almost all people in the world, against those who seek to reshape the world as a kleptocracy.
Now is the time for all of us to put our shoulders to wheels.
Join a party or a cause.
Get working. Get thinking. Take action.
Let’s write a better story.
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Source, clip 1: Youtube, EU Debates, “Democracy Under Threat?…”
Source, clip 2: Youtube, Liberal Democrats, “Conference Live: Ed Davey Leader’s…”
Source, clip 3: Youtube, CNN, “AOC and Bernie Sanders Take…”
Source, clip 4: Youtube, Politicon, “James Carville: Why We Lost”
