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120 | Tae PrıLosorry or Eco-PoLıtics on the ¢ruth of the three statements ...) All three objections are valid, by the way, they are linked. It is true that nowadays one has a chance to attain a democratic mandate, i.e., the trust of the majority of voters, only if one acquires control over the means of mass communication. His/her truth will become the opinion of the majority; they can even determine the topics on which the majority should have opinions in the first place. It is a cliché, but could nevertheless be true that in media-saturated mass societies the citizens have no firm political preferences. In contrast to previous periods, today people have to take a position on such complex issues requiring specialised knowledge that they have no time, knowledge or ambition to navigate them. They settle for making their own one of the competing parties’ opinions without being able to check their accuracy. Perhaps this is exactly the reason why party preferences are surprisingly stable, while voters, according to the opinion polls, do not trust the parties to which they might happen to be clinging obstinately. Decisions are not even made in Parliament anymore, but are rather based on the work of specialised apparatuses, behind closed doors, via the deals of influential businesspeople and party leaders. ‘The problem is not new. The classic Greek thinkers viewed the limits of democracy similarly. Aristotle, who faced the failure of ancient democracy in the court of a (possibly) enlightened autocrat — and who possessed the most practical common sense among his colleagues anyway — considers the participation of citizens in the rule of the city state indispensable. He does, however, tie it to three conditions. First, there cannot be too many of them. Meaningful dialogue, and perhaps agreement, is possible only where the everyday experience of coexistence and interdependence creates a strong bond, Secondly, they should be neither too poor, nor too rich. The overly rich can deceive or bribe the overly poor at any time. Democracy was invented for the middle classes, for people who possess some measure of intellectual and material independence. Thirdly, they should know whomever they elect to any post. The observations of the Greek sage are made extremely timely exactly by their seeming untimeliness. What can we do with them, one can ask, in a mass society where tens and hundreds of millions have to be governed? Where the middle classes have been destroyed by economic globalism and deprived of their influence by political centralisation? Where they vote for candidates whose fictitious personality the media builds up, then destroys with the aid of character assassination, fake news and falsified or stolen data?
