Creating A New Democratic Anthropological Type The public, the people, will find a way to create forms we cannot even imagine, forms that could solve problems that seem insuperable to us. So what is needed is this constant creative activity from the public, and that means mainly everybody’s passion for public affairs 51 — Cornelius Castoriadis
With inequality and environmental degradation on the rise, a growing number of social movements are struggling to achieve the right to directly participate in the decisions that will affect them and potentially alter the course of the world; in other words – direct democracy. One often neglected but essential way of moving core democratic values and principles like cooperation, passion for participation in public affairs, solidarity and equality from the margins of our collective life towards its center, is the attempt to create an anthropological type that deeply embodies them. The implementation of direct democracy on a larger scale is impossible without the wider self-empowerment of common people (those, situated “below”). Ultimately, who will realize in practice a system based on popular participation, if not the public itself? Who will participate in the direct-democratic institutions we imagine –
51 Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Problem of Democracy Today” 61
