Democracy - or are the Demo crazy?

Funny word democracy. Well in a sense anyway. A Greek word. Demo means people I believe and cracy means rule as derived from the greek krati or as Wiktionary points out - From the Ancient Greek suffix -κρατία (kratia), from κράτος (kratos, “power, rule”).

So hence - the rule of people. It does not define how many but we see it as the general mass. The Romans used the same idea - republik or res publika, which means the same originally but to day democracy refers to our system of making decisions at any level and republik is a form of government - i.e. president instead of a king,- regardless of how the president got to power.

Power to the people was one of John Lennons slogans. He most certainly called out for debate and in fact I believe he was right.

Democracy is something we, in Iceland, would not want to lose. So obvioulsly we were happy to embrace things like blogs, chatsites and communication pages like facebook. So if the media and governmental (how mental is governmental?) debate is not sufficient you can bypass it on the net.

We can go for conformed unity a la Hitler and Kim the Korean and make sure dissidents get lost - literally. Or we can allow different viewpoints, freedom of speech and made our disagreement and debate lead us to a common decision. Very Hegelian - Tesa - antitesa create syntesa. So this is the basis of democracy, debate, putting ones case and then decisions taken by the majority.

This is not a strong side to Icelanders. We have examples of attempts to boycott votes,- the best though being the presidents decision for the third time to go against Parliament,- even when two thirds of the MPs had agreed on the matter. So the MPs were voted in a general election, they assessed an issue and reached an overwhelming decision. Then the president said I do not agree so lets put it to the people...

The fact that the "people" appear to be happy about this must mean that the people do not trust the Parliament, - they voted. Its a bit circular rather than Hegelian.

There is another side to this debate and democracy.

Democracy means we debate and argue our case. we listen to others and try to reach a consensus of sorts. It also means we don't fight with fists and weapons, we respect the other opinon, however stupid it may be and either take a hint or convince the other side. Then we see where the majority lies.

We do not threaten, bribe, ridicule or disregard. (to be continued)