15

O PI NI ON

C O MME N T

THE CONTROVERSIAL INDIAN | COMMENT

We need democracy because people can be

wrong
Tabish Khair

FEBRUARY 19, 2017 00:15 IST

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Its the only political system that allows us to regularly check the mistakes
we make, bloodlessly, and correct them

The people are always right. No? Ah, but then they vote for leaders like Donald
Trump and Oh well, we can add to the list, internationally and nationally!

Does this mean that democracy is a mistake? No, quite the contrary! But we have to
hack away at some stubborn centuries-old shrubbery in order to see the foundation of
this clearly enough.

One of the greatest myths about democracy started largely by the Left in the late
19th and early 20th centuries and continued with a twist by the Right into the 21st
relates to the most common rationale behind it. The people are always right, claimed
the Left in the past. The market, or the consumer, is always right, claims the capitalist
Right today, tweaking the Leftist argument cleverly.

Between them, they justify democracy as a form of political organisation based on

human beings being basically always right. Very little in the past from the picnics
at public hangings outside London jails to the genocides of colonisation and Nazism
justifies such confidence in people being always right. Over centuries, people have
been horribly wrong at times.

Majoritys mistrust

Way back in 1882, Henrik Ibsen, the great Norwegian playwright, wrote An Enemy of
the People (adapted into a film, Ganashatru, by Satyajit Ray in his last years) around
one aspect of this perception, arguing that one needs to be morally and intellectually
ahead of people in order to be right. Ideas and truths, Ibsen suggests in this play,
get dated, habitual and platitudinous, and hence the majority, which lives habitually
by grasping on to platitudes, tends to mistrust the truly ethical and intellectual
individual. In other words, if you are Jesus, you risk getting crucified.

But even this argument is faulty: a lot of intelligent people can go horribly wrong.
Cleverness does not necessarily save you from mistakes, and even ethics can be
twisted in painful ways: there are many in the U.S. who claim to be pro-life and
hence will criminalise abortions, but they spare little thought (and no money) for the
plight of women forced into unhappy pregnancies or the future of poor, abandoned
and unwanted children.

History is full of brilliant people great leaders, scientists, thinkers, planners

who helped destroy a village, a nation or an age. Sometimes it appears that
intelligence, on its own, merely provides a person with an easier ability to make
excuses for his or her mistakes, and hoodwink others in the process.

So if people whether as individual or group, entrepreneur or consumer, tribe or

republic, nation or political party, king or voter seem to make horrible mistakes
much of the time, what hope is there for democracy? Why believe in democracy at
all?

Actually, one can argue that the main justification of democracy is exactly this: that
anyone ordinary voter or monarch can be wrong about any given matter. The
ability to make mistakes is human neither power nor riches nor education can
eradicate it, though self-awareness might help. A king or dictator can make a mistake
as well as the majority of voters in an election who vote in a party or a leader with bad
plans. But in a democracy, after a period, during the next elections, such mistakes can
be corrected.

A democracy, in other words, allows us to regularly check the mistakes we make

bloodlessly and correct them when their disastrous consequences become finally
clear to us. This is far more difficult, and costly, to do in any other kind of (autocratic)
regime, whether justified in worldly or divine terms.

Living with ones opponents

Democracies are not necessary because people are always right: if we were certain of
being right all the time, we would not need any political organisation at all, let alone a
democracy. We would be gods. Democracy is necessary because people groups and
individuals can be wrong. Hence, in a democracy one learns to live with ones
opponents, not exile or murder them. This is a political version of the fact that in life
we always live with others or with the Other, the self who is not and cannot be (by
definition) entirely yourself.

Democracy is the only political option that allows us to mitigate the effects of our own
mistakes, and the mistakes of others. Democracy is necessary not because the people
are always right, but because human beings are often wrong. We forget this only at
great peril to ourselves and others.

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