"The boss called one of his employees into the office. 'You’ve been with the company for six months. You started off in the mailroom. Just one week later, you were promoted to a sales position, and one month after that you were promoted to district sales manager. Just four months later, you were promoted to vice president. Now it’s time for me to retire, and I want you to take over the company. What do you say to that?''Thanks,' said the employee.'Thanks?' the boss replied. 'That’s all you can say?''Oh, sorry,' the employee said. 'Thanks, Dad.'""It doesn’t matter how effectively you assert control over your own actions and reactions, how minutely you plan your own life–other people can always come along and chuck a spanner in your freshly oiled and smooth-running works. Is there something you can do about other people’s behaviour?" the rose went on."Actually, you’d be surprised just how much you can do to encourage other people to behave in ways which will benefit both you and them, says Richard Templar. I’m sure, he goes on, you’ve realised through your life that the best times are the ones when everyone is pulling together, working in harmony, feeling a spirit of co-operation. Usually—and it's no rocket science, unless you’re a sociopath—you’re happier when the people around you are happy. It follows that the more you can do to make everyone else’s life better, not just your own, the easier and more enjoyable your own life becomes.The skill is in creating happy people around you. Yes, even that grumpy colleague, or your stressy sister, or your critical college tutor could be a bit less grumpy or stressy or picky if you knew how to handle them. Of course you can’t wave a magic wand and make all their troubles vanish, but you can at least make the time they spend around you more pleasant for everyone.The only thing that change us was our behaviour. You was still the same person and so were them. However, a little changes in behaviour made so much difference that we saw a completely new side to each other. And–almost as if we’d been acting out some corny movie–we became firm friends, keeping closely in touch even after we’d moved on to other jobs and other parts of the country. So, how one person modifying their behaviour can influence the people they interact with.There’s no one on the planet who isn’t shaped by their personal experiences. So when your colleague snaps at you, or your friend lets you down, or your partner forgets your birthday, just remember there’s always a reason. It might be a rubbish reason, but there’s a reason. So, first identify the reason, then it makes it easier to deal with other people’s negative behaviour. Even if you can’t change the way they act, you’ll find it slightly easier to take if you get the reasons behind it. And often simply because you’re prepared to understand, they can let go of being defensive and decide to change their behaviour. It's not excusing bad behaviour. Of course no one should take their stress out on someone who doesn’t deserve it. Or their anger, their anxiety, their insecurity or anything else. But it happens. It's not for asking you to understand the other person’s motivations for their sake, but for yours.Low self-esteem is behind a huge amount of unhappiness and, indeed, mental illness. A lot of behaviour that drives you mad in other people, from bullying to control freakery, can be fed or even caused by poor self-esteem.The word self-esteem has become used much more frequently in recent years. People used a different term to mean the same thing–self-worth. In some ways I prefer the old-fashioned term because its meaning is much more obvious. It’s about seeing yourself as being of value.This sense of having value is something that everyone needs in order to be comfortable in their own skin. Some of us struggle with it more than others, and we all have times in our lives when it comes easier or harder. For example, your parents might have felt they were valued, important and useful when they were bringing up a family, but once the kids have left home and they retire, they might start wondering what use they are to anybody.You’re not responsible for anyone else’s self-esteem–so long as you’re not undermining it–but it’s useful to understand that this is a feeling everyone needs. Even your overbearing, charismatic, confident colleague. Maybe they already have a healthy sense of self-worth, but if it was undermined and taken away, they’d suffer badly.Everyone wants to belong – it’s human nature. But what do we belong to? Actually, we all belong to lots of tribes and groups, some bigger, some smaller. Some close, some more distant. You belong to your family, your village or borough, your city or region, your country and so on. You also belong to your school, or the company you work for, or your local health club, or your social media group. That’s all well and good, until there’s a conflict of interests between these groups. This is at the root of a lot of global problems. On a national level you could call it patriotism, or you could call it protectionism, depending on your perspective. However much we’d like everyone in the world to be happy, if we feel our own happiness is threatened by a move towards the greater good, it’s hard to vote for the greater good.Talking about 'voting', in Democracy we're always faced with the decision to vote. The initial problem facing any student of democracy is how to define the term. Democracy is a fuzzy term, says Roland N. Stromberg. According to Stromberg, the word is all around us; it is constantly used in the news media and everyday discourse to define our own culture and to shape our policies toward others, who are said to be delinquent if they are “undemocratic” and may even need to have this nebulous entity thrust upon them by force. Democracy continues to occupy large space in headlines: it triumphs over communism, is restored in Haiti, is hailed as the master principle of our age. One of the five goals for joint action by the United States and the European Union, proclaimed in December 1995, is “development of democracy throughout the world.” It is presented as a cure-all for troubled peoples and lands. But its failures or inadequacies even at home are also frequently deplored: books are written every year such as The Betrayal of American Democracy (William Greider). “Cry Democracy!” headlines The Economist (December 1987). “The main political issue in the world today is the advancement of democracy,” a Polish colleague of Lech Walesa proclaimed in 1989.Democracy is confused with liberalism or constitutionalism or social equality or national independence; it may be taken to mean majority rule or minority rights. The meaning varies with the time and place. Democracy is invoked as a model and used to legitimize different causes for different reasons.We could add other places where the word has undergone strange transformations. Throughout the world, everybody invokes it, even tyrants. The longtime Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos published a book proving that his rule was, as the title claimed, 'Today’s Democracy'. Communist-ruled countries called themselves 'people’s democracies.' In postcommunist Russia, members of the extreme nationalist party, which many dubbed fascist, and which in combination with ex-Communists strove to overthrow the precarious reform government of Boris Yeltsin—a Soviet and Russian politician who served as President of Russia from 1991 to 1999. He was a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1961 to 1990—called themselves—ironically?—the Liberal-Democrats.Politicians typically mouth the word democracy when—as is often the case—they can think of nothing else. Democracy is a hurrah word. General histories of the United States are titled, for example, 'The Making of a Democracy.' William L. O’Neill calls his book on the United States in World War II A Democracy at War. Definition of the term has often depended on local conditions and special circumstances. For example, when in the 1980s the old British Liberal party merged with elements from the right wing of a bitterly divided Labour party, who called themselves Social Democrats, the new party decided to adopt the name of Liberal Democrats. (Social Democrat was the name of the pre-1914 Marxist parties, including Lenin’s in Russia, but in British usage it tended to convey more democrat than socialist.)One often meets the term liberal democracy. Two things are vaguely conflated that once were seen not only as different but as antagonistic. The point is 'Democracy,' the London Economist (1995) opined, 'is not just a matter of casting ballots, important though that is. It is also about free speech, religious tolerance and the rule of law.' In popular western usage today, liberal democracy may often be about all these things, but historically as well as conceptually each is a separate thing. Religious toleration and freedom of the press arose at separate times, both long before there was any democracy in the sense of allowing people to cast meaningful ballots. Constitutionalism, or 'the rule of law,' has even more ancient roots. These things would not have been called democracy prior to the late nineteenth century at the earliest. Using a word so indiscriminately risks turning it into a nonsense syllable. One may feel, as J.R.R. Tolkien remarked about freedom, that 'the word has been so abused by propaganda that it has ceased to have any value for reason.'None of the criticisms of democracy, under whatever definition of the term, that we meet today is new. They have all been heard many times before. Inefficient, a school for tyrants, an impossibility (the many cannot govern), a fraud, a trick played on the people; or a symptom of cultural disintegration, the rule of inferiors, the debasement of culture and thought—democracy always received these same rebukes, however inconsistent with each other they might be.There are two larger meanings of democracy, corresponding roughly to stages of historical development: first, the organic, 'totalitarian' democracy, marked by consensus and hierarchy, that is found among people sharing a single close-knit culture and value system. Operating within the closed community it can approximate perfect democracy, with a minimum of alienating processes and institutions—as in the election. This vision of an idyllic pastoral community was the source of early democratic idealism. It persists today, in greater or less degree, among less modernized peoples, even among those who are the most modernized, as a recurring archetypal influence.Next came the elective parliamentary system, chiefly English in origin, developed in nineteenth-century America and parts of Western Europe within the context of the nation-state, resting on a balance between pluralism and community. Disenchanting to the degree that it proved workable, assailed by rationalists and idealists for its pragmatic opportunism and concealed elitism, it was theoretically flawed but a practical success. Intellectuals might identify this kind of democracy with a capitalist economy or a lowbrow nationalist culture. It lost its glamour, was systematically denigrated, and survived only faute de mieux, it seemed; yet it presided over the most successful era in western history. In its practical application it varied from country to country, being integrated into the special customs of national cultures. Granted, it seems precarious; as the distinguished student of democracy Robert Dahl remarked, 'the conditions most favorable for polyarchy [successful pluralistic democracy] are comparatively uncommon and not easily created.'The second kind of democracy replies that direct democracy is utterly impracticable in a large nation and that any serious attempt to apply it beyond an extremely local level must lead to a repressive dictatorship. Organic democracy is an obsolete tribalism, viciously intolerant even in its time and today likely to lead to the persecution of minorities on a national scale. Its main exemplar in the modern era was Hitler’s Germany. Representative democracy, on the other hand, admittedly imperfect, manages to struggle along in the most advanced communities. There is nothing to replace it that is at all civilized.There is perhaps a third kind of democracy that is the political order of the presently emerging totally modernized, pluralized, urbanized, rationalized, consumerized, secularized, culturally homogenized global society. It is democratic because it is unable to tolerate any authority or believe in any legitimizing myths, but it has all but lost that mental discipline and community spirit without which elective government is impossible. And so it is condemned to waver back and forth between free and unfree regimes while searching for a secret that still eludes humanity: how fully autonomous individuals can live together harmoniously in a just and free community. 'The disease of our civilization on both the communist and capitalist side of the fence,” a Yugoslav wrote, 'is the alienated helplessness of the citizen confronting a governmental machinery that is too vast and complex.'Despite all this, Democracy has been prematurely pronounced dead, not once as Mark Twain was but innumerable times, indeed in almost every decade since the 1790s. This is still going on: we have had recent works titled The Death of Democracy, The Death of British Democracy, The Collapse of American Democracy. Not only popular tracts by the desperately disillusioned, but serious treatments of the subject had to consider the possibility of such a demise. Similarly, democracy is always going through a 'crisis.' The year 1975 saw publication of a book about 'the crisis of mass democracy' in late nineteenth-century France and of one titled The Crisis of Democracy.In Indonesia, the potential for fraud was apparent long before the election was held, as well as during it and afterward. When things go wrong, who do you blame? The fish rots from the head down is long used metaphor for leadership. If the person in charge does a bad job, it will have negative implications for everyone working under him or her. It might be, the 'head' must be cut first.If we know what the good life is, from whatever source, then we will work to establish it. No one could approve establishing evil by democratic means, or shrink from establishing good by undemocratic means, if it is apparent to all what good and evil are. In Emil Brunner’s words, 'the question of just or unjust laws is more important than the question of democracy or not democracy.'We'll go on our discussion in the next fragment, bi 'idhnillah."Then the rose sang,Malu aku malu[I feel ashamed]pada semut merah[to the red ants]yang berbaris di dinding[that are lining on the wall]Menatapku curiga[Staring at me suspiciously]seakan penuh tanya[as if full of questions]"Sedang apa di sini?" *)["What are you doing here?"]
Citations & References:
- Richard Templar, The Rules of People, 2022, Pearson Education
- Roland N. Stromberg, Democracy: A Short, Analytical History, 2015, Routledge
*) "Kisah-kasih di Sekolah" written by Obbie Messakh
