TED Talk review: Can democracy exist without trust?

The central idea of the speaker’s talk is a long growing distrust in

democratic institutions and governments. To support his opinion hi brings up 5
revolutions, that contributed both positively and negatively to the state of current
democracy. Those are the cultural and social revolution of the 1960s and 1970s,
the market revolution of 1980s, the end of communism in 1989, the birth of the
global world, and the revolution in brain sciences.
In my opinion, to identify and eliminate the problems of modern democracy
we should consider both governmental and societal issues, as one directly
correlates with another. When looking at the current state of politics it’s hard to
blame people for their distrust in the political institutions. Unreasonable policies,
low wages, sky-rocketing real estate prices, elimination of the middle class in
multiple countries, corruption – the list can go on forever. It’s no surprise, that
most of the politicians occupy their positions only to make their lives better, while
turning a blind eye completely at the hardships of the people they swore to
represent and serve to. From multiple standpoints the democratic vote system is
rigged, and the opinions of the majority can be easily manipulated into adopting
policies they don’t need. Those, who were supposed to make the lives of regular
people better abuse their power for their own benefit. You do that over a span of
20-40 years, and you get yourself a public, that has little to no trust in any political
institution whatsoever. The only way I can imagine improving the situation here is
to provide transparency in most areas of political work, such as budgeting, policy
making, etc. Trust in the ruling power should reward people, and not punish.
But we cannot identify all challenges of modern democracy while
concentrating on the government only. The word democracy itself means “a way of
governing which depends on the will of the people”, or to put it simply it’s the
government where the power is given to the people. While it is unfortunately can
be hardly applied to the current state of democracy, we should still analyze what’s
wrong with society itself to better understand how to find the best solution for us
all. I strongly believe that any group or organization starts from an individual,
meaning that to solve the global issues, one should always start with himself. As
speaker mentions, the internet has completely changed the way we communicate,
and I would like to expand this topic a bit more. If we go back to the good old
days, say 50-60s, it is proven with multiple research that people were living in
much closer communities and cared more about people around them. And by
caring, I mean a genuine desire to make each other’s lives better, whether it’s your
friendly neighbor or a stranger. And that desire, that inner call to make your
community strive and prosper is what made democracy great, because people used
their power to improve the quality of life for everybody. Modern reality has very
little of that. You see people waging entire informational wars against communities
they don’t agree with, people forgot how to argue and discuss things, how to listen
to one another and exchange ideas. Now everyone stubbornly defends his point of
view and does not want to take the rest into account. We have radical leftist on one
hand, who are trying to destroy all the traditional family values and biological
concepts, who try to project their delusions on to other people and deny any
freedom of speech if it offends them. On the other hand, we have radical right
wing, where people are to conservative to let go of old concepts like racial
prejudice or gender discrimination. And while they are busy fighting with each
other, screaming and babbling all over the news about how one is much better than
another, the government has a carte-blanche when it comes to policies or any other
political activity. It benefits them greatly, to have people occupied with this
meaningless warfare to the point, where they don’t notice being fooled. You can
easily manipulate people into accepting policies you need by simply winning the
majority of votes, as it takes only 51% of votes. And until that 51% won’t start
caring about the rest 49%, until each and every voter won’t stop to think “This
policy appeals to me, but how would it affect the rest of the people” we would
remain stuck in this cycle of hatred, and the democracy will lose its purpose.
So, to summarize this review, I want to say that we can still fix the
democracy in the world, but we have to take matter into our own hands to do so.
As John F. Kennedy once said: “One person can make a difference, and everyone
should try”.