Searching For and Finding Democracy

A Love Letter to the People that (Still) Dare to Care

“What is democracy? Where has it gone? And, how do we bring it back?” Those are three of the biggest questions I have been grappling with over the past year. Given that I studied law out of my love for democracy (instead of a STEM discipline which would have been a far more natural choice for me when I finished high school), I would have hoped that at least the first of those three questions would have been easy to answer. Yet, in these times, I feel like the neat definitions and explanations that I learned in law school and I once believed could capture and explain the essence of what our democracy is simply no longer do.

Our democracy now does not feel like it did when I was growing up or when I studied law. Something has fundamentally changed. Something feels off. What is written on paper still looks largely the same, but what we are living through is very different. I have been actively trying to put my finger on what that is and where it stems from for a year now — and while it might sound like a complete cliché, after spending the last few weeks travelling longer distances through Europe by train and striking up conversations with all sorts of people along the way, I feel like I have finally managed to put my finger on at least a part of it.

When I asked myself a few months ago how to start preparing for our upcoming production of The E-Waste Podcast, it quite quickly became apparent to me that selecting topics and speakers was not going to be enough. I knew I needed to run a few mock podcast takes, and ultimately that I would have to practice and stretch my conversation skills a bit further again. The question was just how I could do that best.

If you know me well, you will know that I love getting to speak to people. That is the starting point for all good storytelling and lawyering after all. There are few things that make me happier in life than learning about the way different people live their lives, how they pick and build their careers, and ultimately understanding what moves them every day and more broadly throughout life. Yet, recording those conversations and posting them online for anyone and everyone to listen to is a very different ballpark than just having a chat in private. That is why, a few weeks ago, I actively decided to challenge myself and try to see if I could strike up and stretch more conversations with strangers into longer and deeper ones in a way that still felt genuine and organic.

I have spoken to a wildly diverse collection of people since — ranging from a well-known sculptor, to a carpenter who renovates historic houses for a living, over to a technician who has spent over three decades working at the same convention center. These conversations have happened in the most random and ordinary places — in grocery stores, on train platforms and bus stops, in hotel lobbies and on expo floors, in public transport, on park benches, and sometimes even in the middle of the open street. While these conversations have forced me to really open up and expand my bridging skills time and again, they have also been beyond rewarding. What has really stuck with me is that, by the time we parted ways, close to every “stranger” I have spoken to over the past few weeks has genuinely thanked me for the conversation and for taking the time to listen to them.

Yet, the most remarkable thing about the whole experience for me is that in the somewhat random conversations I had over the past few weeks, I came closer to “feeling” democracy than I ever have since my student days and early twenties. While this might not be a very lawyerly thing of me to say, I now think something feels off in our democracy because the feelings in our democracy are quite literally off.

Let me break down why. Our democracies and constitutions vest the power in the people and entrust the people with the ultimate responsibility to collectively act in the best interest of the society as a whole. Those are big shoes to fill and they require listening, understanding, and connection. They also require kindness, empathy, humility, and a degree of selflessness or altruism for the greater good. Those are all things we are arguably not very good at at the moment, and we may very well have been better at in the 1990s and early 2000s. Yet, I think the thing is not so much that people (from the generations that were alive in the 1990s and early 2000s) truly do not know how to this anymore, but it is more that they simply do not take the time to and have forgotten just how important it is. We all crave being noticed, seen, respected, and factored in, but how often do we still do this for others?

This photo was taken the first time I was in Brussels, during my early days studying law.

If I think of the democracy I was surrounded by in my childhood, it felt like a place where bad things could happen but someone would normally catch you or stand up for you at some point. It was not a perfect system, there was lots of space for improvement, but improvements were continuously being made and it felt like most people cared about one another. Our democracy of today feels like a place where bad things happen and they often go unnoticed, unaddressed, and/or unrectified — and the “winners” in our society are somehow the people that accumulate the most for themselves without having to share or the ones that can get away with the most without getting caught.

Over the years, we have been taught that caring for others is silly and naïve, that there must be a personal benefit in everything we do for others, and that love should be reserved only for our romantic partners or our close family and friends. It is “cringe” to dare, “cringe” to dream and fail, and “cringe” to want to change something for the better and believe we can play a role in this. It is “stupid” to care and get hurt, “stupid” to invest in things that will not bring us financial gain, and “stupid” to put faith in others.

If you take a step back and think about all those things, you will realize that unchallenged they will result in a slow but certain death for our democracies, and I think that is also what we have been seeing happen over the last 10 or 20 years. We have stripped away at our democracies for so long now that a lot of people think “democracy” or “justice” means that their own rights are being upheld — and not that a fair compromise or balance is being made between all the rights at play. To put it bluntly, I do not think that this new view is “democracy” or “justice” at all, but it is just egocentrism looking to excuse and validate its bad behavior.

After spending years in law school and practicing law, it feels really odd to say this, but I think — at its very core — democracy is a feeling and it is a kind of love. To function, our democracies require us to stand still from time to time, to be curious (in largely unjudgmental ways), to ask and listen, to process and think, to be vulnerable, daring, and risk looking a bit silly in public, and ultimately to put our own egos aside often enough to allow us to collectively move forward. The people who wrote our constitutions vested the power in the people, not only because they feared the risks of concentrating power in a small group of people or a small political elite. They vested the power in the people largely also because they trusted ordinary people to know what is best for them — but that “best” was never intended to be an individualistic best but a communal or inclusive one.

Over the past decade, we collectively became busier, have found ourselves continuously stressed, overstimulated, and ultimately distracted. Yet, we have treated all this as an individual struggle rather than the collective struggle it is and stopped checking in with others. We also started believing in and projecting out a type of perfectionism that has never really existed — one that overlooks the value and learnings of honest failure and overglosses the importance of vulnerability. With all that, our democracy, which is embedded in connection and only really found in honest conversation, started disappearing. We stopped feeling like our democracies work because we stopped listening with kindness and empathy and stopped seeing democracy as a form of love that requires active participation. We lost sight of the fact that our democracy was built to end disparities, violence, and oppression and somehow started treating it as a mere tool to capitalize our personal gain.

And so, if you ask me right now what democracy is, where it has gone, and how we bring it back, I would encourage you to go out and try to find and rediscover it for yourself. From my experience, this can be best done through conversation, dialogue, and collaboration with the people you should be sharing your democracy with. It will likely feel strange at first, but I suggest you try to move through outdoor or shared public spaces (including public transport) with your phone tucked away and have a look what you really see around you without “echo chambers”, “filter bubbles”, and “algorithm vortexes”. I encourage you to muster up some courage and strike up a conversation with a stranger with the intention to really listen, understand the other person, and understand who it is you are sharing this democracy of ours with. Chances are both you and the “stranger” you speak to will leave the conversation feeling lighter and more seen than you have in years. If doing this seems too scary at first, you can also just try adding on an extra question or two to a conversation you organically find yourself in with someone you do not know that well, and see where that takes you. And if you really want to flip the switch on how things are currently going, offer or try to do something kind for someone else without an ulterior motive. After all, I think our democracy thriving through individuals’ and communities’ efforts to do good should be motive enough from time to time.

Looking back, there are few things that shaped me more, as a child growing up in the 1990s, than seeing how my grandfather would and could strike up a meaningful conversation with pretty much anyone who he met. Speaking to strangers was not the most common thing to do in the (fairly introverted) Finland of the 1990s, but my grandfather was always curious who he was sharing this democracy of ours with, so he did not let the status quo stop him — and I wish we all had the courage to do that every once in a while. My grandfather was always asking others how they were doing. He was also proactively looking for small ways to change things for the better and always prepared to do small things to help. I realize now that that love not only stemmed from his love for democracy, but it was democracy itself being lived out every day.

It took a while to name it and now say it out loud but, over the years, my time working in human rights and social impact fundamentally taught me to see that no one carries more democracy in them than the people that still care about others — even when it would be a whole lot easier to look away. That logically also means that if democracy is something you want to see more of, you should be taking more active care of the people and the world around you. I say that because I truly believe that while division and indifference may be the fastest end to a democracy, connection and caring may well also be the fastest way to bring it back. In line with that, we will probably only start “feeling” democracy again, when we actively carry it within ourselves and allow it to radiate out of us over to those around us. Our democracy was always about lifting others up and being lifted up, we just need to rediscover the vulnerability and courage to do precisely that — because, if you ask me, the real “cringe” or ”stupidity” is walking through life believing that our democracies are separate from us and nothing we do matters in shaping and keeping them alive.

This photo was taken in the 1990s, when my grandfather and I would often go fishing together.