Democracy and Educommunication

DEMOCRACY AND EDUCOMMUNICATION

by Carlos Ferraro*

"Politics, according to the social doctrine of the Church, is one of the highest forms of charity, because it seeks the common good." - Source: Encyclical "Fratelli Tutti" (2020)

"Democracy needs virtue, if it doesn't want to be a victim of its own mechanisms." - Source: Encyclical "Fratelli Tutti" (2020

When countries with formal democratic systems approach the times of the electoral process, it is common to hear citizens complain about politicians, speak ill of politics and in many cases exempt themselves from commenting on the subject, arguing that they are not interested in politics. , to disbelieve in it and supposedly to stay out of it.

It is common to believe that politics is the sole domain of politicians, and to project onto them the responsibilities for all the evils that occur in the world.

In society, few understand that politics is the responsibility of those who exercise power representing and of those represented who elected them to different public offices.

This argument that can be recognized as basic, however, contains the knot of what weakens the democratic system.

There is no other person responsible for what happens -for better or for worse- in democracies than the citizen himself.

The vote should be something like a conditional and provisional letter of power towards the president, the result of a training process, critical information and fundamentally awareness of values that build the common good in its maximum breadth on the part of the president.

What is it like to be a citizen?

He is an active and responsible subject who must be interested and permanently informed of what is happening in the world, in the region where he lives, in his own country and in his community of belonging.

Being sufficiently open to information from different sources, avoiding being pigeonholed in one that only shows the reality that conforms to their convictions, thus falling into an informative and cognitive bias that keeps them in a safe zone.

Being a citizen means understanding the economy, geopolitical interests, knowing human rights, having a sensitive look at socially disadvantaged sectors. It is necessary to understand how the hegemonic media operate, especially when entering the pre-electoral periods. Analyze reality. Learn to argue in order to know how to debate. Express and question their own ideas and those of others. Listen with empathy. Dialogue, guide, propose and even hope.

The citizen must understand and accept that democracy does not work only with the vote, which requires the active and permanent participation of him as a protagonist. You must learn to claim, to fight for your rights and those of others, to monitor and demand that your representatives comply with the mandate granted.

You must become aware and exercise the collective and supportive practice, not individualistic of the save whoever can.

It may be thought that meeting these requirements in the common citizen is a utopia. And yes, it is. However, who could prove that a citizen with these achievements, virtues and abilities would not substantially improve democracy? Or, that without it true democracy is possible.

It is common to hear political scientists or sociologists question democracy as a valid system of representation. It is possible that it will have to be rethought in terms of representativeness or participation, taking into account the experience suffered by the peoples inserted in that system. But any new democracy that is envisioned needs interested, involved, active, empowered actors.

It is not very useful to cast blame and live constantly complaining about politics. Preach that: “They are all the same.” There is no way out”, “It is useless to fight with power”. “They are all corrupt”. These thoughts or attitudes do not add up, they do not cause change, they do not provide a way out, they are only comfortable manifestations that place the individual in submission to that power of which he complains.

It is imperative to understand that if I do not exercise and monitor my rights and those of others, the interests of spurious power will advance on abuse and domination.

It is useless to think that democracy works by itself. It is wrong to believe that in the exercise of it anyone can do whatever they want. Freedom, an essential constituent of the same, requires limits and responsibilities of all actors in their different roles and functions.

Although it is difficult and sometimes understandable to accept, it is necessary to think that in real terms, most politicians are not corrupt. In fact it is so. It is unfair not to recognize that many of them work carrying out, most of the time with particular effort, the ideals with which they are committed to improve reality. It is fair to think about the things that are achieved, to make an effort to look objectively at the actions of change towards the common good, regardless of the ideology that the president represents. It is imperative to think that not everything and not everyone is the same.

The democratic citizen is not a static actor. It lives a permanent process of civil growth. He is interested in and defends public affairs; and even if he personally needs little of it, he is aware of the importance of policies that improve the quality of life of the social group.

But a citizen is also one who must have active memory. Keep in mind those facts that settled the reality of today. Memory is not a nostalgic or spiteful gaze. It is what allows the "thought past" to be present, so as not to repeat what recent or past political history teaches that it is necessary to change to achieve superior results.

If we agree that this is how citizens are formed for a fully functioning democracy, there is much to be done.

The first thing we think about is the need for education and from there we derive the question:

What kind of education is the one that forms a citizen?

Let's think first about the education that should not be .

It cannot be the one that is functional to the system to be transformed. The one that teaches history uncritically, in which whoever teaches does not dialogue with the learner. An education that dispenses with showing the political dimension in the life of a society. An education that only trains for knowledge without delving into values. An education based on meritocracy or competition. It cannot be an education that deposits everything in technology. It cannot be an education that denies differences. That does not teach to contextualize, to think critically, to emancipate the subject who learns. It cannot be an education where reality, the ultimate object of study, is left out of the classroom.

Today the exercise of education occurs within a framework of ideological reality that we cannot ignore: the advance of the ultra-right, populism of any kind, neo-fascism or ideological fanaticism that leads to fundamentalism of any kind. These extremisms adversely affect the development of a democratic education. There is not much to discuss on this topic, the cracks, the polarizations and the prejudices installed in the social structure account for it. It is also not possible to build democracy with a system of media and networks that express themselves with symbolic violence, lies called fake news , misinformation, contradictory and even perverse and dehumanized discourses that feed the social imaginary.

Thus, for the formation of a citizen, education and communication must be inextricably integrated. There is no education without communication and no communication without education. Those who understand educommunication know that it builds a holistic view of reality that combines knowledge, differences and recognizes complexity, which develops the critical dimension and at the same time creative propositive that is what makes the difference towards the possibility of change and recognizes the value of community and collective.

Social change for democracy is not supported by nihilistic or skeptical subjects. Furthermore, their speeches become dangerous because they do not contribute, they do not build, they are empty and they create a field for disbelief and make those who are confused or comfortable fall into a vacuum that others will fill with other interests. In politics the only empty spaces are the ones one is willing to leave.

Democracies have suffered in recent times a circulation of discourses that transit with the complicity of political power and the hegemonic media, aggravated, in some cases with the support of the legal system. It is notorious how these speeches appeal to defamation, discredit and cynicism, often bordering on perversion. We are witnessing a degradation of political discourse that leads to naturalization and consequent acceptance by the citizenry. The contradiction, the distortion of the facts and the aggressive excess of the discourse seem not to matter; "anything goes" is accepted.

The emergence of leaders with violent and radical proposals as ways of solving problems is observed in the democratic panorama. And the most worrying thing is that a social anomie seems to be taking place that does not warn or react to the low human quality of the political figure. Inconsistent leaders in political vision, lack of sensitivity for the people, even a lack of solid knowledge to know how to manage the complexity of power and the real needs of the people, their constituents, are accepted.

The majority of citizens have forgotten the essential principle of implicit democracy in the word that defines it and means, "demos" (δ ῆ μος) which means "people" and "kratos" (κράτος), that is, neither more nor less than Sovereignty is held by the people who exercise it directly or through their representatives.

The first step to take is simple and urgent. You have to go back to the beginning with the advantage of more than 2,500 years of experience with democracy to know what needs to be corrected or changed. And we also have how to educate to achieve it.

*He is an Educommunicator, President of SIGNIS ALC and Director of the Department of Education for the media of SIGNIS World