My generation was brought up believing we lived in democracy. In fact, democracy was not only a ubiquitous reality, albeit still a young one in Spain; it was also the uncontested normative optimum from a political viewpoint.
However, I would contend that the evolution of certain key aspects of our societal lives points to a new successor, both from a factual and a normative angle. Emocracy might be a suitable label for it.
These aspects, or phenomena, include unworthy elected leaders reigning in the developed world, or a peculiar type of backward-looking political decision dividing society in two like a sharp knife making its way through soft butter.
As I see it, in current emocracies feelings dispense ‘feelers’, or the subjects/owners of those feelings, from the traditional requirement of having to question their nature and, yes, their merit too. Declaring a feeling is now the end of the road towards formulating a consequence, which more often than not demands an accommodating response from others.
Feelings have earned a new respectability, both from an individual and –this is of critical importance– when they happen to gain some sort of majority backing. Whilst in a democracy recognizing a feeling merely kick-started critical introspection, in an emocracy solid argumentation is now being replaced and stripped of its pivotal importance in knitting durable social fabric.
In his wonderfully troubling thought experiment titled “The Man Who Was Thursday” G.K. Chesterton challenged the anarchist credo and attitudes as adolescent, which is to say immature. I am of the opinion that if he were alive today the through experiment would be far more ambitious in its reach!
Oh, this happened too a couple of weeks ago: (in Spanish). Well done (once again) Civio team for this well deserved new award!
