I am not a person who is politically motivated. Politics is the battlefield of social interests, in which the individual is represented but not present. The individual’s interest is sacrificed in the system of representative government to the amassed voice of the collective. Anyone who participates in this late 19th, early 20th century system justifies the distance created between their personal interest and its representation.

A hundred years ago it was the mass organization that vied for representative government and liberated the masses from the rule of the elites. In the era of mass organization through mass media and technologies, the representative government was the logical outcome of historic development. But this system like any other organized collective gravitates intrinsically to abusive power with fascism and stalinism as a result. Only when there are absolute checks to protect the single interest is this system stable enough to maintain the status quo, like in the United States was the case.

New technologies however have created an economic production process that requires greater mobility on a macro and micro scale. Globalization and the rise of a post-industrial socio-economic structure are the necessary outcome of this process. The politicis of the representative system however has not kept pace with these technological developments that drive social organization. Where the social structure has offered greater freedom, responsibility and independence to individuals, the system of government has not emancipated power along that track. Instead representatives in modern democracies in the 21st century still hold as much and many of the same powers as they did one hundred years ago. This system in in complete contrast with the organization and structure of modern society in the west. There are no technological obstacles to eliminate representative government in favor of a truely direct democratic system, however old power structures are not willing to advance toward a stronger voice of individual interests in our democracies.

I believe that many representatives in western democracies will even openly refuse to progress toward this. The main reason is that many elected officials represent civic interests instead of individual interest, meaning the interests of corporations and capital. The fact that many citizens have been allowed to own petty capital has anchored civic interests into the middle class, whose main fear is to fall out of the ownership class. The middle class citizen is the backbone of corporate interest.

I am not a person who is politically motivated. My only moral and political engagement is that of my personal liberty. This is the ethics of progressive society in the 21st century. The alternative is a representative system of corporate interests in which the face of the individual’s interest is invisible, although not per se absent, as they might partly collide. There are no principles beyond the equality of my voice in the political arena, an equality of which no corporate, collective or representative is elevated above.

note: expand to include the American bill of rights and constitution, and the rule of the majority in a winner-takes-all system.