The elusive collective voice

SO IT GO

When I first went to live in a big city in North America, my almost immediate impression was the astonishing level of order in the place. Trains and buses were clean and smartly maintained and operated on schedule. I was amazed to sometimes find myself the only passenger on a bus or streetcar late at night; how could they afford this level of service?  Traffic was rigidly regulated. Health standards were adhered to.  Potholes in roads were quickly repaired, and I never saw a dead dog on the road. The city was replete with signs telling you where you were, and how to get where, and where to park. Government employees serving the public were efficient and courteous (they would even display a sense of humour). In Toronto, bars closed at midnight; you could not get a drink at any price at 12:01 a.m. any place.

For years, I gave credit for this general condition of efficiency to the governments of the various places I went, and while that is certainly part of the picture it is the minor part.  When, through personal experience, you begin to interact with the workings of developed societies you begin to see that a pivotal part of their success is an elaborate network  of institutions that underpins every aspect of its sophisticated operating entities. And, most of all, it is through these congregations acting as pressure points, if you will, that the citizens are able to influence the very nature or state of their society. I will go further: true democracy as its affects the individual, is largely a myth at the political level; it is principally through the exertions of those scores of institutions, each devoted to its own special interest, that the “wishes of the people”, as a group, come to pass.    Those institutions, or sometimes the members individually, stand behind the various establishment agencies responsible for various streams in a presence that works as a prod or a conscience or a motivator for the actions that a society must take to produce essentially a better life for its citizens.

And although this kind of institutional pressure is not officially part of the establishment system, and indeed is not always visibly in play, to spend some time in the observation of this condition in very developed societies is to see that it has a powerful effect on significant actions, ranging from restraint to expansion, generated within the establishment.  In effect, the institutions while having little tangible power, act like the conscience of the nation pulling political or moral levers in the process.

And in every move that a society makes, the institutions emerge to exert their influences.  Like grass following rain, they spring up and become a continuing presence.
And the efforts are not frivolous.  Many of them become powerful forces, sometimes mowing down politicians before them, and even confronting their own national leaders in their cause as we saw in the case of the post-election Obama.

The institutions organise professional leverage. They galvanise positions. Indeed, part of their success owes to the single-mindedness of the mission: they may well be individuals who have general concerns about their society, but in these organizations they are focusing on one specific subject – the rule of law; the physical environment; art; combating AIDS; sanitation; education; historic buildings; etc. – and in that focus they take on a prominence and a certain legitimacy bolstered perhaps by their seemingly apolitical stances.

There are obvious examples of this influence – the National Rifle Association in the US successfully fighting Congressional controls on gun ownership; the women’s liberation groups in several countries; the clean-air organizations in Canada; the animal rights’ groups in the UK; etc. – but there are many less visible ones that contribute impacts to the way of life in developed societies.  Britain, for example, boasts several efforts dedicated to combating degradation of the English language; they exert influence on education policy. There is a British website of a group dedicated to the propagation of the works of Shakespeare. They are out there shouting to make their specific
points.
To have lived therefore in such societies is to notice that in almost any less developed place, such as Guyana, institutions with that kind of focused ability to exert meaningful impact are lacking. Any time you see a society where systems of order, or regulatory agencies, appear to be deficient, or absent, it is almost always the case that (1) its parallel non-establishment institutions are absent or (2) the existing ones have either lost their steam or become neutralized in some way.

Certainly at play here, as everywhere else, is this general slide into entropy any place we find mankind living in large groups. As the Peruvian Nobel Laureate Mario Llogas said recently, “while mankind has certainly improved the mechanics of living, morally and ethically we have definitely gone into decline.” But even given that as a reality, the societies in which there seems to be hope for a significant measure of  “a better  life” are those where the national institutions are vibrant and succeed in stimulating, in the first instance, at least the need for order, and to then get to the higher plane of the value of the somewhat more refined aspects (subjective as those may be) of what “a better life” constitutes.

Of course, I’m expecting the argument that Guyana has more pressing needs at the moment: that before we move to the process of fine tuning the engine we must first fix it.  That is an understandable position, but it points to the larger problem: without a cadre of dedicated private persons organized in various groups to exert influence on our successive governments, we will continue to have little meaningful impact on improving the nature of everyday life.

Individual voices can speak. Individual letter-writers in the press can articulate a point very well. But individual voices do not have the power to affect change.  It is only when those voices come together in organizations representing hundreds, or thousands of citizens, that they attain the power to influence. Any politician in any country can ignore and does ignore the individual expression, but that same politician pays close heed to the collective voice.

Don’t believe for a second that all the refinements and efficiencies you see in a developed country have come about because of the largesse of the government or corporate structure there.  In every case, those things are the result of organized pressure from voters and consumers who are pushing the improvements, demanding the changes, dictating the course.

We lack that effective institutional pressure here, and as long as we lack those assembled voices the refinements we want to see will remain elusive.