Society carries a compass within itself.
That sounds like an ideal. It is an observation.
Wherever people have actually been able to shape their own living conditions, they have developed the same things:
Freedom in cultural and intellectual life. Equality in political and legal life. Fraternity (solidarity, the common good) in economic life. These are not three fine words from the French Revolution. They are the three fundamental needs of the human being as a social creature. The compass is real. It is already there – in every person, in every society that is allowed to unfold.
So, why does the world look the way it does?
Because three forces are systematically blocking this compass.
MoneyPower – those billionaires and corporations that have turned extreme wealth into political influence – undermines equality and solidarity. It creates monopolies that hollow out competition. It buys politicians and media. It privatises profits and socialises losses. Not as occasional abuse, but as structural logic: the more money, the more power; the more power, the more money. 🔄
The party system prevents long-term decisions in the common good through its structural priority of power: politicians decide in ways that get them re-elected – not in ways that serve society and the planet twenty years from now. This is not a question of personal failure. It is the inner logic of a system that rewards short-termism and punishes foresight. Jean-Claude Juncker said it openly: “We heads of government all know what needs to be done, but we don't know how we can get re-elected afterwards.“
The state education system reproduces both of these blockages by mass-producing self-interest maximizers—people who have learned that only the result counts, not the path; that competition is the basic principle of life; that elbowing your way to the front brings success. Not because teachers want it that way, but because that is how the system is designed: by politicians, for political purposes, according to political criteria.
These three blockages are not accidental. They are systematic. They are the system.
And their interaction produces what we experience daily: ecological destruction, democratic erosion, social division. The crises of our time are not random. They are the distorted mirror images of what is attempting to emerge – but is being forcibly prevented.
“The soothsayers came, but none of them all
Could interpret the writing of fire on the wall.”
Heinrich Heine
There is a way out. But it does not lie where politics is looking.
No party, no programme, no ideology will overcome the three blockages – because every party is itself part of the power-tactical blockage, every programme can be corrupted by oligarch’s MoneyPower, and every ideology is reinforced by the systemic stagnation of the education system. Whoever looks for solutions within these structures reproduces the problem.
The key lies in a different question: not what is decided, but who decides – and under what conditions.
The three blockages have one thing in common: they all distort who has influence. MoneyPower buys influence. Parties channel influence to careerists. The education system shapes people who regard self-interest as the natural state of affairs. The result is a society in which society does not decide – but a small minority that has learned to capture decision-making processes.
The structural remedy is a form of decision-making that is immune to power-seeking, lobbying and career calculation. That is sortition – selection by lot. Not elections, which structurally produce partisanship, polarisation and short-termism. But an assembly composed by stratified random selection from the whole of society: women and men, young and old, urban and rural, all professions and income levels. A cross-section of society – as it really is, not as parties segment it.
This assembly already carries the compass within itself. It does not need to learn it. It only needs the conditions to unfold it: time, information, professional facilitation, genuine deliberation – and the freedom to decide without career pressure.
This is what citizens' assemblies across Europe and beyond have demonstrated in recent years. They consistently reached bolder, more cooperative, longer-term conclusions than any elected parliament. Not despite being composed of "ordinary" people. Because of it.
In this lies the essential logic: if the crises of our time are not random, but the distorted mirror images of what is attempting to emerge – if polarisation is the suppressed impulse towards freedom, corruption the suppressed impulse towards equality, predatory exploitation the suppressed impulse towards solidarity – then sortition does not stand in a void. It is the structural condition for the compass to become visible.
In the 21st century there is no single main lever left. No party, no programme, no revolution in the old sense – no seizure of influence or power that changes everything at once. The necessary transformation must happen simultaneously in all areas, and from below: starting from people, in economic life, in legal life, in cultural life. This seems logically impossible. But every great innovation seems logically impossible – until it exists.
The probability lies on the side of regression. And yet: those who understand uncertainty not as paralysis but as the condition of action can decide. It is on this improbable that we must wager. That is not blind faith in success. It is the refusal to consider the still-invisible impossible – and the decision to begin now.
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