Democracy as therapy

So waht are the outcomes I imagine from demotherapeia? Many of them are the same as in other forms of democracy: collective decision-making, identifying and advancing the common good, and harmonious society, though in a different model of democracy they would be a little different. Others include emancipation and collective self-reflection - and, in fact, these are the primary aims. It's for these reasons that I tend to consider this model as "democracy as therapy", because rather than democracy aiming for a type of binding collective decision-making, the aim is for talking out issues to motivate reflection that leads to harmonious outcomes. I think those things are pretty similar, but it is worth considering how they are different, which I'll try to do below. First I'll talk through the three more traditional outcomes, and then the two more novel ones.

Collective decision-making

Most forms of democracy aim to facilitate some type of colelctive decision-making, either by having citizens vote on policies (direct democracy) or vote for representatives who vote on policies (representative democracy). The outcome is that a wide variety of people participate in policy selection by voting, and the theory is that people will generally be accepting of the policy outcomes - even if they disagree with them - because they recognise the legitimacy of the collective input.

Demotherapeia differs because it does not have binding policy outcomes. In one significant sense, this means that demotherapeia doesn't have any collective decision-making, because there is no final decision that is made collectively. What can occur, though, is that reflections and personal commitments can motivate other personal commitments that all align, leading to a type of aggregate decision-making that functions similarly to collective decision-making. This is because people can be motivated by the "force of reason" described by deliberative theorists, but rather than this force of reason leading to a consensus that can formalise a decision at the end of a session, it occurs as participants put their reflections into practice one by one as they make commitments.

The common good

Another outcome is identifying and advancing the common good. That is, most democratic models claim not just to put the people in charge and order society in a peaceful manner, but also to make society a better place with the chosen policies. Of course, depending on who you ask and what metrics you use, this can be very difficult to measure. But the theory of some models of democracy is that by getting people together to talk about social issues, they are more likely to identify and rectify these issues, and that this could not be done without the participation of the people.

Insofar as demotherapeia focuses on discourse deconstruction, the job of the participants is to identify the power-structures in society and whether they are problematic, including whether they oppress parts of the population in any way. This focus on discursive or social systems of power means that demotherapeia is inherently aiming to identify the common good, and through the disempowerment of oppressive structures, advance it. This isn't as straightforward as identifying and proposing a policy that positively impacts some portion of the population, but it is similarly directed.

Harmonious society

A commonly stated outcome for democratic models is that they produce peace, either within or between states. This is not primarily because they bring order through laws and enforcement (which is sometimes questioned), but because they limit government action by enumerating rights, and they provide a process through which disputes can be resolved peacefully, and because people are likely to consent to the democratically produced laws and desire to change them through further democratic means.

Demotherapeia provides a forum where people can raise issues and grievances, generate empathy and support, and resolve disputes. While it doesn't offer the same structures to produce peaceful outcomes, its "no-power" approach reduces some of the friction of competitive politics and provides a way to approach issues in a non-adversarial manner. In addition, the two more novel outcomes of demotherapeia add to the potential to create a harmonious society where people get along with each other: emancipation and collective self-reflection.

Emancipation

One of the more novel outcomes of demotherapeia is emancipation. Most theories of democracy aim to construct legitimate places and uses of power, and to codify the limitations of that power over citizens. Liberal theories of democracy propose that people will be more free if there is sufficient order to society but where people are still allowed to make their own choices, which means not too little government and not too much. These constructions of power are sometimes later considered to be problematic - for example, it was at first not seen as a problem that women could not vote, and then later it was seen as a problem. But once legitimate power is constructed, making changes to it is difficult and has to happen, to a smaller or greater extent, outside of those legitimate constructions. That is, it has to happen in the streets, in protests, from people who have been excluded from those legitimate places. The power works against them, and they need to push against it. Emancipation from those constructions of power is possible, but can't be done using just those legitmate procedures.

Demotherapeia aims for emancipation: to continually identify the constructions of power (both those highly visible and those relatively invisible), and then deconstruct them so that they can no longer how power over others. This isn't some external critique of the system that the system itself is resistant to, but a central feature of the system that makes it what it is. It can help individuals make changes to their own lives by realising that they don't have to adhere to some social standard, or it can help make structural changes as people critique traditional norms that have been consciously or unconsciously used to exploit others.

Collective self-reflection

The other novel outcome is collective self-reflection. Many models of democracy look to make collective decisions, and what precedes those collective decisions are debate, deliberation and negotiation. During elections, candidates engage with communities, compete with each other, and make points of comparison. All of these things can involve self-reflection, either individually or collectively. But this self-reflection is, in a way, a type of happy by-product of the procedures that are put in place. The ultimate goal is still, generally, to win and use power.

Deliberative democracy differs in that it proposes the quality of deliberation is the defining factor. It believes that the collective engagement and the force of reason will bring participants to a consensus, and perhaps to a consensus that no individual had conceived of when they started the process. Where a consensus doesn't emerge, deliberation will at least clarify the construction of the conflict for the participants.

Demotherapeia aims for something similar. One distinction I would want to make, however, is that demotherapeia doesn't specifically deal with "conflict", even though conflict is one of the primary criteria for many theorists to consider something "political" (that is, where there is conflict between people, there is a political situation). What constitutes a "conflict" is constructed by some discourse, so the central thing that two people in conflict would first engage with is whether or not what they have is a conflict at all. That might stem from their different views on power, justification or legitimacy, for example, but as those things are deconstructed they may discover that they are not in conflict as they had originally imagined.

That is, one of the most potentially powerful outcomes that demotherapeia can provide is the chance for people to dissolve, rather than resolve, conflicts, by realising that they are not in conflict and don't, in fact, have to take any action in restructuring society rather than just reflecting on their perception of society. For example, rather than resolving an injustice, collective self-reflection might make people re-evaluate whether an injustice occurred at all, or what "justice" might be in this particular case.

In fact, one possible outcome is that the dispute may be recognised by all parties as not resolved, and also as unresolvable. And this might be a good thing. The participants have had the opportunity to say their piece, to understand the position of the other, to reflect and engage, and can come out of the process knowing that they have done all that they can peacefully and discursively. The resolution might be that both parties have to live with the issue, to reflect on it from time to time, and to manage their own expectations given how intractable the issue is - and, through this, live harmoniously with the other party. This is a different response, I think, from most other theories of democracy, which largely propose that there is a way that issues can be resolved through the application of democratic power. It is for these reasons - that issues can be dissolved rather than resolved, and that some issues can be recognised as intractable as a relatively harmonious outcome - that I tend to describe the process as one of therapy.