The Festival of Voices

The Festival of Voices

I was walking with my daughter through town. The festival was winding down, the smell of fried food still hanging in the air, the sound of half-drunk voices drifting out of the tents. Everywhere, people were talking. Loudly, freely, endlessly. But the words were thin. Gossip, trivialities, half-formed political opinions traded like jokes.

And I thought: this is the public we place at the center of democracy. These voices, unanchored from context, carried only by the rhythm of chatter. Switzerland prides itself on its direct democracy — the people vote, the people decide. But walking among them, I wondered if it is really the people who decide, or if they are merely guided into saying yes or no to questions they barely understand.

People think they know what is going on in world affairs, in their own country, even in their own city. But they only skim the surface. 

Headlines, slogans, fragments of debate — enough to give the illusion of knowledge, never enough to reach the truth. And that is dangerous. For the moment you believe you are informed, while in reality you are only manipulated, you become the perfect citizen. You think what the elites want you to think, you repeat what the elites want you to repeat, and you call it freedom.

In a small community, democracy might still work. There, you know who is corrupt, who can be trusted, how a decision will affect your street, your fields, your daily bread. But once democracy scales, it changes character. It becomes theater. The crowd debates Trump or Zelensky as though they were football scores, as if great historical struggles were just another round of neighborhood gossip. The machinery of power — parties, media, bureaucracy, corporate interests — remains hidden. The people are handed a ballot and told their voice matters. But it is a voice without resonance, trained only to echo what has already been decided.

Machiavelli knew that power always bends appearances to its advantage. Hegel knew that no event can be understood without its context. Yet here we are, pretending that context can be ignored, that history can be reduced to slogans and checkboxes. Democracy, once a living bond between citizens, has become a ritual, a festival of voices.

And still people defend it fiercely. They say: “Yes, but in essence it works. Democracy cannot be evil.” Cannot be? Look at what happened only yesterday. During the COVID years, democracies turned authoritarian overnight — lockdowns, censorship, forced obedience, suspicion cast on anyone who doubted. All under the banner of “democracy protecting itself.” The thin mask slipped, and what stood behind it was power, raw and unquestioned.

Or look at Germany. They call it a democracy, but it looks more like a demockracy — a parody of the thing it claims to be. The second largest party is treated like a disease. Its members are hounded out of public jobs, branded untouchable. The so-called “democrats” erect a firewall, not of argument but of exclusion, and speak openly about banning the party altogether. That is not democracy; it is bullying dressed up as virtue. And in that moment you see it plain: democracy can be no better than an authoritarian dictatorship. With a dictatorship, at least the front line is clear — you know who rules, you know who to resist. With democracy, the front line is hidden. Power hides behind ballots and procedures, striking from the shadows, harder to name, harder to fight.

Or look to the United States, the great exporter of democracy. How many wars have been launched in its name? Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya — interventions wrapped in democratic rhetoric, leaving only wreckage behind. Was that democracy? Or was it empire wearing democracy as a costume?

History is full of these moments. The Athenian democracy condemned Socrates to death. The French Revolution proclaimed liberty and filled the guillotine. The Weimar Republic voted itself into dictatorship. If democracy cannot be evil, then what are these examples but its shadow?

The myth says democracy is the natural endpoint of history. But no: it is the exception, fragile, and often brief. It flourished under Pericles for a generation, before tearing itself apart with demagogues and bribery. Even the Greeks could not keep democracy in check. Why should we imagine ourselves wiser?

And if we ask why the U.S. can get away with this — why it can wage wars, stage interventions, live in contradictions without collapsing under the weight of them — the answer lies in the structure itself. The people are kept trivial, fed bread and circuses. Football, celebrity scandals, partisan theater on television. The crowd is entertained, distracted, given the sense of participation while nothing truly changes.

Meanwhile the elites act without restraint. Corporations fund campaigns. Lobbyists write laws. Presidents come and go, but the machinery of empire runs on. And because the United States lives inside a bubble — two oceans as walls, unmatched military power as insurance — it never faces the consequences others must face. No empire could get away with this in the long run, but America can in the short run, and so it does.

And Switzerland? Always presented as the shining exception. The people voting on every issue, the poster child of direct democracy. But scratch the surface, and the illusion cracks.

Have the people ever truly voted for the endless flow of immigrants? Yes — they voted against it in 2015 with the Masseneinwanderungsinitiative. 

The Swiss majority spoke. And yet it was ignored, neutralized, diluted until it fit the elites’ program. That is the pattern: when the people vote “wrong,” the vote is run again, or buried in technicalities, or simply defied. Sometimes three or four rounds, until fatigue sets in and the “right” answer emerges.

The same with Europe. Repeatedly, the people have said no to joining the EU. And yet, step by step, deal by deal, Switzerland has been drawn into the EU’s orbit until the difference is cosmetic. Did the people vote for this? No. But it is happening anyway.

And COVID exposed the farce most brutally. Yes, there were referendums — but what kind of free vote is it when the media hammers only one answer day and night, branding dissenters as dangerous, unpatriotic, insane? A referendum under propaganda is not democracy. It is manipulation dressed up as choice.

So even in Switzerland, the great “success story,” democracy is no more than a charade. The people are allowed to play at sovereignty, to feel proud of their little votes, while the real direction of the country is set elsewhere, by elites who will not be stopped by the will of the people.

Let’s stop lying to ourselves. Democracy has never been the rule of the people, but the rule of elites laundering their will through ballots and parliaments. 

Democracy feeds not on freedom, but on obedience dressed up as choice. It is not the end of history, it is the oldest trick in the book.

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