When speaking about digitisation, I tend to rattle off all the good I see in it to make the world – and democracy in particular – a better place: thanks to digital tools you can educate yourself with the most niche knowledge, advocate your political opinions with like-minded people in a heartbeat and serve as your government’s watchdog without even leaving your couch.
But whether digital or not: democracy is so much more than ‘just’ a political system. In my understanding, democracy goes far beyond politicians, parliamentary processes or a political decision made at the ballot box; it’s much more about what happens before, in between and after. For me, democracy is a system of values, a mindset, a cultural state. This desirable ideal state of democracy constantly needs reevaluation and renegotiation in the midst of society, a journey that ultimately needs to recognise and include each individual as part of a society.
To spur this, I ran a project fostering digital democracy for more than two years: With demokratie.io, a project by the Berlin-based think-and-do-tank betterplace lab, we researched and experimented how digitisation and democracy come together in practice. We found that computer games can enrich democratic education, that mobile apps can support a more diverse discussion and that platforms can pave the way for access to previously not publicly available information. We concluded that digitisation holds a lot in stock to enrich different aspects of democracy, such as empowerment, participation and transparency.
But when we look at today’s world, talking about the potential of digitisation is only half the story. Don’t get me wrong, I personally believe in the benefits of access to knowledge, broader participation and more transparency. And I believe that a digital democracy in its societal and political sense is the future. But I also think that it’s not all that needs to be looked at. When digesting recent findings on how society is deeply divided (be it in the US or Germany) or trying to get a grip on the theory that a lot of people want the chaos that is evolving in the world, I find the most promising look to understand what’s happening this day and age is inward. With this, I am not alone.
Author Hanzi Freinacht (nom de plume) argues that we fail to take into account the subjective dimensions of life and how they fundamentally shape society and reality. In the book “The Listening Society” he claims to further look into the developmental psychology of people – be it a political leader or a “regular” citizen – and understand them as truly humane in their multifaceted personas. With striving for a listening society – and he means that literally – he calls for a society where no one is left outside the conversation, where everyone is heard and has their needs met. He argues for a deeper kind of welfare system that includes the psychological, social and emotional aspects of human beings. In this society, the inner state of individuals is just as important – if not more – than their contributions to society from an economic point of view.
What would a society look like that puts not the ego but the soul in the center? Do we dare to ask and try to answer those questions? What kind of political shift do we need to spur a mindset shift like that?
The “Spiritualise”-report by RSA’s Dr. Jonathan Rowson gives an impartial answer whilst calling for more spiritual sensitivity to address the challenges of the 21st century: It argues that spirituality – a term itself hard to define and most probably not used inflationary – can help us strive for a society with a better balance of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Extrinsic values like a growth mindset, materialism and an ego-centric lifestyle nowadays manifest in the climate crisis, the need to break free from a scarcity mindset is evident. Most matters of the public sphere have spiritual roots that have yet to be accepted and approached. Ronan Harrington – the founder of Alter Ego, a yearly gathering of cultural and political visionaries – calls out the shortcomings of the neoliberalism tale (“salvation lies in work and materialism”) and asks for a new story of spirituality that needs to be told.
All these authors are onto something: They argue that the narrative of what it means to be human needs to be retold within the framework of a digital world. What we as individuals alone and as a society collectively defined as commendable (from materialistic to post-modern values) needs tremendous scrutiny. Finding our blind spots as a society calls for each and every one of us to look out for our individual ones. Challenging your own beliefs is a scary thing, it is a vulnerable place to be in. But luckily, science backs it up that being vulnerable is the one thing that makes connection possible. And what we desperately need is to reconnect – with our environment, with other sentient beings, with ourselves.
When wanting to reimagine democracy, we must pay closer attention to the inner world of the individuals that are part of it. The matter of digital democracy is not simply sharing technocratic arguments of how to digitise political processes or take participation into the digital realm. We cannot ask people to be engaged in politics or society, if they are struggling to deal with their everyday hassle of their inner lives. Because frankly, how can I feel the world, if I cannot feel myself? I simply cannot. We should refocus on the essentials of being human, that go beyond rational thinking, and elaborate strategies and activities to support a cultural-psychological development – as individuals and as a society. Strengthening our capacities for reflection and using our minds to find one’s own purpose in life are the actual tasks of democracy in the digital age. Needless to say, that we require a system change as a whole – the current debate around democracy should give us leeway to rethink the interconnection of democratic concepts, from direct to representative and from participatory to deliberative democracy altogether. But inner development is crucial to begin with.
There are some innovators dealing with adult development, offering new paths for societal development as a whole: Perspectiva strives to inspire our (political) leaders to approach today’s problems with a deeper appreciation of the influence of our inner worlds, the School of Life is serving as a resource in our quest to finding fulfilment with self-knowledge, and last but not least, organisations that experiment with new forms of leadership and distribution of power serve as a practical example, such as the organisation I work for, the betterplace lab.
Can digital tools play an important role to help us rewire how we as individuals and society reflect and create meaning? Possibly, yes. Since technology allowed us into the position of being idle consumers, it might as well help us find a way out again. Will technology be our remedy? Definitely not. It is our individual responsibility to do our best to reconnect to the world, ask ourselves the all-comprehensive questions (How do I create a meaningful life for me and the world, am I on the right track to do so? What makes me human?) and start the conversation with our inner selves. And then expand it to our families and friends, colleagues, bosses and even our political adversaries.