I like my politicians scared and my fellow citizens informed and engaged. And voting.

Otherwise, everything slides: The public feels it has no voice, the politicians think God’s in their corner.

Then, people wonder why “democracy” seems diminished to ritual language and proportions.

This is all about who controls the levers of power or, literally, who owns power.

While the workings or the essential nature of power may be murky, its applications and outcomes are all too easy to spot.

Democracy seems, in this context, a radical idea about the locus and distribution — and even the design and purposes — of power.

Lofty and stirring rhetoric aside, it’s an incredibly sophisticated and abstract social idea, very fragile and subject to attack from all corners.

In our own times, democracies have suffered damage or outright destruction in a number of countries, replaced always by dictatorships or autocracies.

In every case, a directionless and agitated or debilitated public chose a person who said: “Follow me!”

Public thinker Terence McKenna believes the level of contradiction imposed by rapid change is rising, that the forces that keep the world sane are collapsing. “Fire in a madhouse,” he suggests.

He speculates that this reflects an enormous increase in novelty, a proliferation, a flood, of “nexts” that........

© Times Colonist