Majority wins

The doemocratic phrase that all of us grew up on. "Majority wins".

When I look back and try to think through all the political struggles that I have heard about it strikes me that the common success thread for theese movements comes from genuine impassioned mass belief in the cause. While the methods adopted to portray the rebellion against authority might differ in each case, for a cause to stand a chance it needs its patrons and foot soldiers. The Indian freedom struggle; the South African movement to abolish aparthied; The American civil war; the American movement for civil liberties, the re-unification of Germany.... The list is endless. The failures of movements without backing is probably equally large. So can we conclude that a movement with sufficient support is self sustaining and guranteed success? If we look at the record this is certainly indicated.

I would like to present a different perspective. To digress a bit, the earth we are told has evolved to its current geographic state through ages of evolution. Every now and then in its history the earth has seen a huge change because of tectonic movements that occur amongst the continental plates that hold land masses together. I refer to this phenomena only because I believe that we are going through a similar fundamental shift in the political geosphere. The world has shrunk. Everything is far more accessible to a much larger sample of the population than it ever was. The shrinking will continue and people will inevitably get closer. But while distances might shrink, communities choose to maintain their distance from each other. As bludgeoning populations continue to eat into the luxeries that geographical isolation afforded communities, the tolerence levels for people between communities seems to shrink as well. My definition of communities is not colored by traditional relegious, language or dialect based classifications. Communities seem to sprout basis beliefs, and in the shriking world there seems to be no dearth of beliefs to unite people. The more the beliefs, the more the differences. Take for instance this unreal addiction that everyone in India has for Cricket. Everything else comes second for the cricket fanatic. This is rather unfortunate for people like me who are equally passionate about footer and have to make do with game re-runs because some silly cricket match was on.

So what is this tectonic shift that seems to have come to my mind? To try and put it as simply as possible, there seem to be a large nos of very well populated communities today. Many of these communities tread on each others beliefs. The tolerrence levels for quite a few of these communities is very low, and they clearly view disagreement as a stain on their beliefs. The community in question is typically large enough to seem to carry significant political clout. A worrying thought for the administrators. When multiple such communities with multiple contradicting beliefs co-exist there is bound to be unrest. Again I illustrate with an example from sport. In the recent past there has been an alarming rise in the nos of racial abuse incidents on the football field. Dont misunderstand me, I do not condone the actions of the abusers, however the size of the population that seems to sympathise with the proponents of racial abuse is alarming. It made the player community and the governing body (UEFA & FIFA) sit up and take notice and resolve to taking some tough desicions. These desicisions are not withouth their repurcursions. So while there might be a overwhelming majority that is interested in a clean and classic game of football there is a significant population that will resort to racial taunts. What does one truely do in such a situation? Can the majority ever truely win? Will the majorities perspective be accepted by one and all?

I dont think so. So we now have a system that kind of relies on a fractured majority trying to reign in the discordants. Very often the influence that this fractured majority weilds over the rest of the population is close to negligible. The results of such discord are felt globally. The victims of confrontations between beliefs are more often than not innocent bystanders. These victims in turn create more fanatics. Why is this happening? How do we stem the rot? Is it rot, or is it the new form of expression? Are we gong to adjust to live with all these belief systems? Are todays leaders and rebels going to be recognised as tomorrows heros and visionaries? The most intelligent amongst us would struggle to find an answer to these rhetorics, so lets not look for any guidance here (at least not yet). The answers I am certain do not lie with a simple majority. And for a while I dont see anyone winning.