Many of the democratic nations have reached a higher level of democracy, but they are experiencing somewhat of a crisis in their nations because they do not know what is the next step for democracy. They have not seen it or they have not been willing to see it. There is a simple fact that has not generally been recognized by the democratic nations, and that fact is the existence of a power elite. The primary difference between a democracy and other forms of government, especially a dictatorship, is that a government that is free and democratic cannot allow the formation of a power elite.
All democratic nations had in their past a more dictatorial, centralized form of government. The central aspect of such a form of government was the formation of a small power elite that could exercise power over the majority of the population. What most democracies today call a dictatorship is a form of government where one person has near total power, and around him is a power elite that has the major function of carrying out the dictator’s dictates.
The true goal of a democratic government
Even if you do not have a single dictator, you can still have a very small power elite that is in a privileged position where they can exercise power without accountability and where they can dictate to the people how the people should live. This, of course, is the antithesis of democracy, and it must be the goal of a truly democratic government to make a very enlightened, aware effort to counteract the formation of power elites. So far, no democratic nation has done a good enough job of counteracting the formation of power elites.
All democratic nations had a power elite when those nations shifted to a democratic form of government. That power elite did not simply lie down and die or evaporate into thin air. They continued to exist and they have, ever since then, attempted to influence the democratic government in many different ways. These have often been hidden ways because in a democratic country they cannot exercise power as openly as in a more centralized power structure. Nevertheless, this also puts a special responsibility on democratic governments to make sure that such a power elite cannot form, even if it seems like a benign power elite.
Does anyone know better than the people?
This brings up the topic that is at the very heart of democracy. What is the essence of a democracy? Well, it is that the people rule. Why then is it so that most nations that call themselves democracies have what you call a representative democracy? The people are not ruling directly by voting on issues but the people vote for representatives in their parliament and then those representatives carry out what they call the will of the people but which too often becomes the will of the hidden power elite.
Why is it that so many of the older democracies know they are in a crisis because the people’s confidence in the government is falling, yet they do not know what to do about it? It is because in those older democracies a power elite has formed and that power elite is not willing to let go of its power. Now, you may say: “Is there not a difference between the power elite in a democratic country and the power elite in a dictatorial country?”
In many cases there is a difference because the power elite that has formed in many of the older democracies is what you could, with a certain irony, call a “benevolent” power elite. It is not a power elite that is openly aggressive and openly, deliberately and maliciously seeking to suppress, manipulate and control the population. It is however an elite who is seeking to manipulate and control the population because they think they know better, they know better than the people how the country should be run. This is a topic that all democratic nations, but especially the older ones, need to consider very carefully.
in just about every democratic nation, you can ask the people who are elected representatives, who are in the bureaucratic establishment, who are in the educational institutions, the financial institutions, and the press and the media. If you ask these people what they think about this topic, most of them will say that the population, the people of their nation, are not capable of running the nation, of ruling the nation, because they simply do not know enough about how to run the country. They do not understand the complicated dynamics involved with running a country.
If you want to be kind to this elite, you may say that they are right. In many nations the people, if you look at the broader population, do not know enough about how their country works or how, for example, the economy works, so that they could rule the country. When this statement is made by a power elite, it is hollow, it is hypocritical because who is in charge of the educational system and the press and the media of that country? Is it not the very power elite who claim that the people do not know enough? If that power elite has not educated the people as to how the country works, whose responsibility is it?
If they have not educated the people, it is not because the people are not capable of being educated but because the power elite is not willing to educate the people because they do not want to share power. It is that simple. There is no way around it, there is no fancy argumentation you can come up with that changes the dynamic here. The power elite of the older democracies have not been willing to educate their own people as to how the country works and that is entirely their responsibility. This form of democracy cannot take the world into the Age of Higher Awareness. It is impossible to move into the next age without educating and enlightening the people as to how a country works because in the coming age the people must rule. They must make the major decisions.
The press must serve the people, not the elite
What needs to be done to change this dynamic? Well, it can only happen by the people beginning to stand up for themselves and demanding a different form of government where they have a more direct influence. This is the phenomenon of direct democracy where the people vote in popular referendums about major issues in the country.
There will be a considerable resistance to this idea even in many of the older democracies. All of these democracies are facing a situation where the population have less and less faith in their elected representatives, in those who run the economy, in those who run the educational systems and in those who run the press and the media. You may say, if you are a member of this power elite, that this is a dangerous development because the people often respond to what has lately been labeled as “fake news.” Why is it that the people are so open to news that do not come from the established sources? It is because even if the people cannot articulate this, they know that they cannot trust what comes from the mainstream media because the mainstream media has as its primary objective to maintain the status quo.
They want to maintain the present power structure. So you may say that it is dangerous when people respond to these fake news (and it can indeed be dangerous) but then, what is the alternative? It is, of course, that the news media that are already there need to wake up and realize that they will only survive if they serve the interests of the people, not the elite.
It is not the job of a free press to preserve the current power structure when that power structure does not serve the people and does not serve the country in the long run. The country is moving into a new phase of its development where the old form of representative democracy is becoming obsolete, is becoming outdated. Of course, the power elite that has taken advantage of representative democracy does not want their hold on the country to be upset, to be overturned, and therefore they will do anything they can to maintain that structure.
This means that there are those among the power elite in some nations who are deliberately creating fake news in order to undermine the peoples’ belief in, or faith in, alternative news media. They believe that by putting out fake news that are so outrageous that people can see through them, or that can be exposed by the mainstream media as being fake, they can scare the people to come back and only listen to mainstream media. This is an exceptionally naive belief and it simply cannot happen. You cannot turn the clock back to a situation where most people had faith in the major media outlets. These media outlets are like the dinosaurs. It is just that those who work in them have not realized that they have become extinct.
The major media outlets in most democratic nations are run by people who are part of this power elite. They see themselves as a benevolent power elite. They sit there in their media towers, their fortifications, and they think that they will somehow be able to survive in the Internet age and maintain their monopoly on printing newspapers, printing books, running television stations and radio stations. They think they can maintain their structure and maintain their advertising income and get people to continue to subscribe to their newspapers and magazines even though the people are losing faith in them. But it cannot be done, and it cannot be done for one very simple reason. They are not serving the people and the people are beginning to realize this in greater and greater numbers.
Why are they not serving the people? Because they have built such an arrogance of thinking that they can know what the people should think about all topics. Therefore, they believe it is not their job to simply report the news and let the people form their own opinion. They believe it is the job of the media outlets to form the opinions of the people. They believe that they know what opinions people should have in order to maintain stability in their country. Yet in a dynamic society, it is not the primary goal to maintain stability but to maintain growth, to create growth, to create self-transcendence.
Representative democracy is a temporary stage
A representative democracy is not the final stage of democracy, the highest form of democracy, the ultimate form of democracy. Democracy is only a means to an end, namely the raising of the consciousness of the people. The formation of a democratic power elite is not serving that purpose in the long run. It was necessary, given the state of communication that was available in the 1700s, 1800s and 1900’s and the level of education and literacy among the people.
There had to be a period where the people elected representatives and those representatives made the decisions in the parliamentary assemblies. That period has become obsolete by technology that makes it possible to spread information, to communicate, that makes it easier for the people to vote on issues so that they do not have to vote only every four years by going to a ballot room and putting their crosses on a printed ballot. Now they can begin to vote over the Internet so that the process is much smoother and much quicker.
The people need to wake up and realize that the age of having a democratic power elite who believes they know better than the people how to run the country is coming to an end. It has outlived its usefulness and it is time to consider what the next stage for democracy is. As an example, let us look at the nation of South Korea.
You have a typical power elite in this country that believes it knows better than the people how the country should be run. You have, which is not completely typical but still it is a phenomenon found in other countries, where you have very strong business conglomerates that have a very strong influence on the democratic power elite. You also have a media that is strongly influenced by the business conglomerates, in many cases owned by them even behind the scenes. They are not likely to write something that will rock the boat too much. What happens here is very simple. You have a process of unnatural selection. Those who desire to become part of the political establishment and either go into the bureaucracy or run for public office by running as a representative, they all develop this attitude of arrogance of knowing better than the people. It is “unnatural” selection because it is a selection process that is not the natural process in a higher way.
Those who consider going into the democratic government (either in the bureaucracy or as the representatives) should gradually be selected based on those who have the highest willingness and desire to serve the people. What happens instead is that you have an unnatural process of selecting those who have the tendency to feel superior to the people.
You end up with a process where those who are willing to serve the people in many cases become disillusioned with the system and decide to withdraw. Either they withdraw from the bureaucracy or they decide not to run for public office because they are not willing to “go along to get along.” They are not willing to follow the culture that has developed either in the bureaucratic area or in the political area. They are not willing to follow, for example, the party discipline and to not speak out about certain issues they know about because it does not fit in with what the party wants to do based on their hidden agenda of cooperating with the business conglomerates or the media so that they do not upset the apple cart and change the power structure in society.
Many of the people who have the potential to bring forth higher awareness ideas have elected by themselves not to go into the bureaucracy, not to run for public office because they know it will be a compromise of their ideals—and their ideals are more important to them than getting a comfortable job or a position as an elected representative. They simply choose to go different ways and to seek another way to make a living or another way to have an impact on the country. You end up with a situation where the people do not feel that they have real representatives to vote for because they do not feel that either side of parliament truly represents the people. They know there is a hidden agenda. They know that the major political parties have, so to speak, sold their soul to the business conglomerates or to maintaining status quo and therefore they do not feel that anything new can be brought in.
Why the people do know best
When you look at the peaceful demonstrations that took place here in South Korea over the issue of the president and the corruption around the president, you can see this as a clear sign that the people do actually know better than the elite because the people know when a change is needed. They may not know consciously everything that is involved with the situation because, again, they do not have access to the full information since the elite is withholding that information. Nevertheless, the people are quite capable of feeling in their hearts or in their gut when a change is needed, when something has been going on for so long, when that something is not right and when they simply cannot accept it anymore. If they had a more direct way of voting for particular issues, they would also be able to feel what would be the best for their country.
There are many among these democratic power elites who think that if their country switched to a direct form of democracy right now, it would be a total disaster because the people would vote for things that would be dangerous to the country. Yet it is not true. Even if all democratic nations switched within the next year to a direct form of democracy, the rule of the general population would still be better than the rule of the elite.
Why is this so? It can be foreseen that in some cases the people would vote for certain issues that could have some not necessarily disastrous effects but certainly would create some turmoil in the countries. It could be predicted that the people would make certain decisions that would create turmoil but again, that turmoil will lead to growth because of a very simple fact. If the people make a decision that turns out to have not the consequences they wanted, then who can the people blame when it was a result of their direct vote?
Who are they blaming now, my beloved? They are blaming the politicians. They are blaming the business conglomerates. They are blaming the media. They are pointing the finger at someone else, but if the people vote directly, they have no one else to point the finger at than themselves. This will mean that a considerable part of the people will wake up and realize that: “If we could make a decision that led to these consequences, then it was because we didn’t know enough about the topic and then we need to educate ourselves so that we can make a better decision in the future.”
What happens in a democratic parliament if the parliament members make a decision that turns out to have undesirable consequences? Well, do they not go back and make another decision that has better consequences? Well, can you not have the people do the same?
Does the fact that you have a referendum about a certain issue mean that you could never have another referendum about that issue and that the decision that was made has to stand for all time? Of course, it does not. The next stage for democracy is to put the people in a situation where they have no one else to blame, where they cannot blame the power elite.
This is what will give maximum growth to the people of those nations, and the people of virtually all of the older democracies are precisely ready to have that responsibility. They may not know this consciously, they may not be ready to articulate it, but they are ready for it and you can see this by the very fact of the growing dissatisfaction with the political status quo.
The people are looking for alternatives. Now, those alternatives are not there in most democratic nations and it is because, again, we need to go back and look at the underlying attitude where you have a small elite that believes that they know how the country should be run and that the population does not know how the country should be run. This is an attitude that is the very essence of elitism, and it goes back to the manipulators and their influence on this planet.
Why elitism creates chaos
The manipulators think they know better than anyone else. You could argue that at a certain level they do know better because they have created so much destruction that they have an expert knowledge of how to destroy anything, which most people do not have. When it comes to creating chaos and destruction, the manipulators do know better than the people.
Creating chaos and destruction has no part in creating the Age of Higher Awareness, and therefore the knowledge of the manipulators is not particularly useful. Have we not seen enough examples in world history of the chaos and destruction that the manipulators can create? Is it not so that in most nations the broader population is beginning to awaken and say: “We have had enough of this chaos, we don’t want any more of this chaos, what’s the alternative?”
The people are actually crying out; “What is the alternative to us being ruled by the manipulators?” They would not be able to articulate it that way, but this is what they are crying out for in their hearts: “Show us an alternative to being ruled by the manipulators, the power elite, who can only create chaos and destruction or as an alternative may be able to create a static society where the majority of the people are the virtual slaves of a small elite.” This is what the people are ready for. They are ready for freedom from the manipulators, freedom from a small power elite who are so arrogant that they think they know better than the people.
It is necessary for the older democracies to step up and give the population broader influence on the political decision-making process. This begins with recognizing that the people need to know more about how the country functions. It needs to be recognized also by the people that they need to be willing to educate themselves.
The next stage beyond welfare
Now you may say, as the ruling elite will say immediately, that most of the people do not want to know better, they do not want to educate themselves. They only want to live their comfortable daily lives and not have anything that upsets their daily lives. This no longer is the case. There was a phase for democracies where the people had grown up in such poverty that their goal was to have more material abundance. If many of you look at your grandparents’ generation, they lived in poverty and therefore there was a phase for modern democracies where it was a main goal to create a somewhat more economically equal situation where no one was really poor, or there are only a few people who are poor, and where you have a broad middle class that has a reasonable standard of living.
This again was a phase. It was a legitimate phase but many of the older democracies have moved out of this phase where there now is such material affluence that the people are getting tired of materialism, they are getting tired of being consumers. They are longing for a deeper purpose with their lives and this is again why they are becoming dissatisfied with their leaders because they are not giving them an alternative to the materialistic lifestyle. Again, these leaders cannot decide what kind of beings they are and what kind of beings the population are. Are they sinners, as the Christians say, or are they evolved monkeys, as the materialists say or are they neither? Is there an alternative to the two?
Of course there is. More and more people are ready for that alternative in a universal form and therefore what the power elite always wants to do is to argue why status quo should not be changed. They use as their argument always that the people are not ready for changing the status quo, but who is responsible for the people not being ready other than those who are in charge of that society? Many are ready to see the utter hypocrisy of these arguments. Can this situation be broken by the power elite? Nay, for they would already have done so if they were willing to do so, for they have had the power to do so. So who can break it? Only the people themselves.
There can come a point where there has been a rising unrest and discontent in the identity, mental and emotional bodies of the people. They feel the tension but they do not consciously know how to direct that tension in a constructive direction so that it has the best possible impact on their nation. This is where the more aware people have a historic opportunity to step in and raise your own consciousness so that you can pull up on the collective consciousness and give the population the direction they are seeking.
This again does not mean that the people will all become members of a particular organisation or teaching, but it does mean that suddenly more and more among the people will wake up and from one day to the next they will say: “Ah, but this concept of direct democracy is obvious is it not, why shouldn’t we vote about the issues? Of course we are capable of knowing what to vote and what is the right direction for our nation. Why should we believe that the power elite will know better than us, isn’t it obvious that we are capable of knowing?” It is obvious that the people are capable of knowing and it is easy to see this.
The limitations of intelligence
The power elite is always talking about intelligence. They believe that there is an intelligent elite who know better than the people. Yet realistically, among all groups of people in a society, there are people even with a high IQ (as you measure it by the standard IQ test), it is simply that those people were not given an opportunity to express that intelligence by getting an education or getting a position.
If you were willing to be completely honest, you could take those who belong to the elite, you could go in and look at the politicians and those who run the big companies and you could subject them to IQ tests and you would find that they would not score higher than the average population. It is simply a myth that the most intelligent people are the ones who have risen to the top of democratic societies. Besides that, you cannot say that a country can be run only by intelligent people who score higher according to the standard IQ test because they also need to have heart, they need to have situational awareness, they need to have wisdom. And many among the people have this.
You all know people who are very focused on themselves, who are very focused on their daily lives and their own situation and what could be called petty problems. You may, from a certain objective evaluation, say that these people are simply not aware enough to make good decisions for their country. This may be so but those people do not make up a majority of the population and those people will vote the same way the people they know vote. As long as you find that broad section of the population that are aware enough, that are knowledgeable enough, to make good decisions, then the country can indeed be run successfully by a direct democracy. When you give the people an opportunity, they will step up. If you do not give the people an opportunity, you will see more and more discontent, more and more unrest in the older democracies.
Two ways towards direct democracy
There is a growing fear of what they have now named “populism” but it is not populism. Having the people stand up and demand change is not populism, it is the future. You cannot simply label it with a fancy label. This is what the ruling elite will always do. A new movement comes up, they cannot ignore it, so they try to label it and then they try to define the label so it seems dangerous and therefore should be stopped. Why should it be stopped? If the people want to elect an untraditional candidate for president or for members of parliament, then why should not the people be allowed to do so? Within the next decade or so, direct democracy will have to be created in most of the older nations. Why will it have to be created? Well, it can be created in two ways. The enlightened way is that the ruling elite realizes that their time is up and that they need to give way peacefully to direct democracy and they need to let the people vote.
The other way is that the people will continue to vote for these candidates that are outside the mainstream and that some of these candidates by their nature will be unbalanced and extreme and therefore they will create chaos. This will scare the ruling elite so much that they say it might be better to let all the people vote on an issue than to have a small minority elect such an outside candidate that it creates too much chaos and uncertainty. In other words, they will suddenly begin to see that direct democracy is the lesser of two evils and therefore they think they can still maintain some power over a direct democracy by the power they have over the media. They think that they can still trust their bureaucracy and they can still influence the country that way.
Of course, it will not happen because they do not realize that you cannot stop the development towards greater awareness among the population. “When the people know better, they will do better.” We are coming into an age where the people want to know better. They will to know better and therefore they will know better and therefore they will make better decisions.
The potential for awakening the people
We have in the last year seen the British people elect to exit the EU. This may not have been the highest decision from a certain perspective, but it was for the British people, at this stage, a necessary decision because they needed to see the consequences of their own attitude towards being in a union with other nations. They need to see that they have not been willing to enter the EU with the necessary attitude of desiring a higher union, a higher oneness, with other nations. They need to see the result of this and therefore, even though there can be many things said about this, it was first of all an educational decision for the British people to take this step.
You have also seen in the United States where they did not elect the president that was predicted to become president because they chose what was the more outside candidate. Again, we can debate whether this was the highest decision or not the highest decision, but it was the decision that the American people needed to make for their own education so that they could have a chance to see whether electing someone who was not from the political establishment is actually better or not. Or whether there could be another alternative so that you could transcend the entire political establishment and the two-party system.
Whichever candidate becomes elected, it is the necessary step for the people. Not necessarily that this is the highest candidate, the highest choice, but nevertheless it is the highest choice in the sense that it is the choice that the people need to make in order to take the next step in the democratic growth of the country and the peoples’ willingness to take greater responsibility for their country.
You have seen now this very significant step here in South Korea that the people realized that by coming forward, by making these demonstrations, by making them peacefully, they could force a change. This is something that many people had not believed a year ago when there first was talk about the corruption of the president. Many among the people simply shrugged their shoulders and thought: “Oh, she will never be impeached, she will never be held accountable, she will be able to get away with this as so many politicians have done before.” Now you see that it is possible to hold a politician accountable. It is possible for the people to make their voice heard.
This is a very significant shift in the collective consciousness as it has been in several other democratic nations, as it will be in the coming years in all of the older democracies where the people will shift. Instead of this voter apathy where they feel: “Oh, it doesn’t matter who we vote for because it will be the same old political soup,” people will begin to wake up and realize: “We can actually influence the future of our nation, we can influence the political process. There is something we can do and we are willing to do it.” This is where more aware people again have the opportunity to raise your own consciousness.
The population is not powerless
What will it take for for people to accept that the Age of Higher Awareness is coming into manifestation on this planet? It will take that you realize you are not powerless. What is it that democracies need to go through? The population needs to realize they are not powerless. You who are the more aware people need to be the forerunners for this realization and realize that you are not powerless. Why are you not powerless? Because you are more aware. You have the potential to be open doors for the energy and the ideas that will bring change. When you make yourselves those open doors, you are not powerless.
This does not mean you form a new elite or adopt any kind of arrogance and thinking you know better than the people. You can realize and accept that when you are willing to tune in to what is the vision of higher awareness for your nation, you can invoke that vision and you can direct the collective consciousness so that more and more people will begin to wake up and suddenly realize: “Oh yes, this is obvious, we now see that this is the next step for our country.”
It is not something forced upon the people. It is a consensus that comes from within their own hearts because in their own hearts what do the people of any nation want? They want what is best for the people and what is best for their nation. So when they see what is best, they do not have to be forced to accept it. They will know better when they are presented with it and when there is the opening for them to have that higher vision of what is possible for their nation, what is the next step for their nation.
The more aware people are in the nexus of the figure-eight flow of energy from higher awareness that is spread out to the entire population. It gives that shift in the collective consciousness so that the discontent of the people is channeled in a positive direction and they suddenly see a positive way forward instead of just being dissatisfied and wanting to overthrow the status quo without having any direction. You have seen in past ages how the manipulators have managed to take the discontent of the people and create a violent revolution that overthrew the old power elite, only to put in a new power elite that was even more oppressive than the old one. You saw it in China with Mao, you saw it with the Bolsheviks in Russia, and you saw it after the French revolution and so many other places.
It is not desirable to see this repeated and that is why the more benevolent among the power elites in the established democracies need to realize that it is in their own best interest to wake up and realize that they will have to bring in direct democracy either as an enlightened peaceful transition or by having the people vote for more and more extremist candidates that create more chaos in your nation than they would like to see.
It is time to awaken those who can be awakened and realize that we have entered a new phase. It is irrevocable; there is no way to turn back the clock. Status quo has been disturbed and it is a matter of bringing forth the next logical step for the democratic nations of the world—and it is Direct Democracy.