Sharif Hasan Leen
The first question that popped into my head while reading this topic was, what is inclusive democracy? I have heard of democracy, it is a governing system invented by the Greeks. In the words of Abraham Lincoln, it is a system made by its subjects, for the betterment of its citizens. But is the classical democracy enough to handle the issues of today’s modern world? How can a man who has no idea about the ecology of the earth take constructive decisions about the Amazon forest, or how to stop illegal deforestation, or how to stop the fire that recently blazed there?
A political man doesn’t necessarily need to know about the share market, but in order to understand what inflation is and how it is destroying this country’s economy, he must understand a little bit of economics. Same goes for all the other spheres of a country that require decisions to run.
What we must understand is that a single man simply cannot know everything. In order to properly run a country, democracy is a suitable system for the proper distribution of power, because it eliminates the unevenness in the society. But even then, a distribution of power is not enough to contain a society. A society is not just its political identity. It has more content, like the economy, its society, and the habitat that its subjects occupy. That’s where inclusive democracy comes in. It is a system that equally distributes the decision making powers of certain realms of a society to its worthy components and makes everyone accountable for the containment of said society.
Inclusive democracy, first of all, eliminates any and all sort of power hoarding in a system; it does not allow any certain representation for the risk of jeopardising the balance. Rather, it keeps its subjects accountable — all of them — and makes them study and understand its four important parts. They are the political realm, the economic realm, the social realm, and the ecological realm.
The political identity of this ideology is classical democracy, which holds every citizen responsible for the decisions taken. The economic realm studies the market, and citizens decide what’s best for their economy and their entire population. The social realm studies the society, evaluates any changes, and tries to find a moral and critical understanding of the society, as well as creating an ideal upbringing for its subjects. As for the ecological realm, almost all of us seem to forget one thing, that we live on the earth, and all of our man made constructs and ideas cannot deny that. In order to live peacefully, we must contain this earth. And to achieve that, a realm of the system must ensure that the earth is contained in a way that both helps humans with its resources, but isn’t exhausted of its resources and sustainability.
In a nutshell, an inclusive democracy is a utilitarian system that takes care of both its citizens and its habitat, in a balanced way that doesn’t hamper the balance between them in any way.
As the youth of this country, the heavy duty of governing our country and our society will soon fall into our hands. This world is already on the brink of extinction. We are drying our world of natural resources, the uneven distribution of wealth and power is creating more and more starved mouths and empty pockets than it was 500 years ago, although we tell ourselves that modernity has eradicated these problems. We haven’t; if only, we have made them more sophisticated. So it is up to us to take care of our world. And just a simple shift in political ideology is not the answer. We need a better solution, and inclusive democracy is it.