Overview of demotherapeia

Democracy has been, by many measures, very successful in its modern form. But recently we've seen some democratic backsliding, where previously robustly democratic countries have started to become less democratic. There are a range of reasons. Some institutions are simply getting old and are no longer considered as democratic as they once were. Other institutions and procedures are being exploited by people who have found their way around the defenses. What is true is increasingly hard to discern, and people are increasingly less interested in discerning it. Democracy doesn't always include everyone, even when it pretends it does. And some of these things are particular to specific institutions - I want to point to the US Senate's filibuster as a clear and extreme example - but some of these things might just be consequences of the way that we conceive of democracy in general.

I quite like the promise of democracy, and I would be sad to see it fail because we never adapted it to the challenges that it was facing. And so I set myself a project of trying to develop a more robust, fairer, more caring democratic model, starting again from some basic principles. The outcome of this exploration of democracy I'll set out in the next few articles. Having spoken to a few people about it, one major question that has been raised in regards to it is: is it actually a form of democracy? Does it adhere to fundamental democratic principles in a way that makes the name relevant, or is it a departure from democracy that is radical enough it deserves its own name? I don't know. I'll make an argument as we go that suggests it is a form of democracy, but I'll also be cogent of the fact that it is missing some of the most familiar elements.

To avoid the whole debate, I tend to call the model demotherapeia. It tries to get to the heart of some democratic principles, such as working together in a deliberative fashion to produce collective outcomes, but it is also missing some iconic parts of democracy, such as voting and legislation. The name demotherapeia is supposed to suggest that it is somewhere within the ballpark of democracy, whether anyone agrees that it is an actual form of democracy or not.

The core concept of demotherapeia is a type of collective social therapy that leads to a harmonious society. To do that, it requires people gather together regularly and talk, and talk in a certain way following certain procedures. In that sense, it is a form of democracy. But it also takes a radically approach to the levelling of hierarchy and imposes no collective decisions on anyone - and in that sense, it is less like a form of democracy and more like a form of anarchism (though I think anarchists might be disappointed that it mandates a procedure to follow).

The point of this collective deliberation, and the way to social harmony, is through the deconstruction of discourses. The idea is that we believe stories that justify how we treat each other, and those stories need continuous scrutiny. We help each other, and hurt each other, because of the stories we believe. If we want to start helping each other more and hurting each other less, we need to be aware of, and critically reviewing, these stories. This is the purpose of collective deliberation.

So in this project, I want to walk through the democratic and discourse theories that underlie the model of demotherapeia, explain how it works, suggest what its impact would be, and then explore what implications it could have if it displaced current models of democracy.