variety and disorder

Digging through Astra Taylor’s new book and thinking a lot about the iterative process of living democracy:

[E]ven without capitalist exploitation, democracy would remain messy and conflicted, full of what Plato called “variety and disorder” (which, despite being democracy’s first and most acute critic, he regarded as part of its charm). Should we ever achieve a fully economically and socially egalitarian society, we’ll still have to strive to balance spontaneity and structure, for example, or grapple with how best to weigh our present-day desires against future needs…

Democracy cannot be reduced to a system of laws to abide, a set of “indicators” to meet, or a ten-point proposal to enact but is instead something more emergent and experimental, a combination of order and flux rooted in both procedure and principle, modes of production (how we organize the creation of goods necessary for our survival) and popular sentiment…

I don’t believe democracy exists; indeed, it never has. Instead, the ideal of self-rule is exactly that, an ideal, a principle that always occupies a distant and retreating horizon, something we must continue to reach toward yet fail to grasp. The promise of democracy is not the one made and betrayed by the powerful; it is a promise that can be kept only by regular people through vigilance, invention, and struggle. Through theory and practice, organization and open rebellion, protecting past gains and demanding new entitlements, the inspiring potential of self-rule manifests, but it remains fragmentary and fragile, forever partial and imperiled.