At the heart of the modern democratic contract is the principle — and the faith — that the majority will decide for everyone.
But it is in fact this majority — neither simply a numerical preponderance, nor an ideology — that constitutes the greatest risk of democracy in our time; a moral swerve that is not simply mappable to a caste or economic structure. Rather, it is a complex combination of motivations and desires tethered equally to old conformisms and emerging markets that believes — if it believes in anything at all — in one primary political value. Obedience.
In this episode, Mutant travels this vanishing line between the democratic majority and this new majoritarian coalition, to deconstruct its abiding myth: that it is nonviolent.
Image courtesy: Tom Vattakuzhy
How do ordinary citizens become the foot soldiers, the automatons, the purveyors of evil? How does barbaric cruelty become a civic norm? In her...
Not only does violence have the capacity to become normative, we also seem to wholly lose our capacity for moral judgement in its wake....
“We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some...