What we have gotten to believe most religiously, are the ideological realities that we tend to live in and not being able to identify what went wrong when we unanimously decided to limit our thoughts to a particular spectrum and never once look beyond that spectrum for solutions. It’s common sense that it’s not always proper to choose something that everyone supports but it is common belief that it should happen. Is it just to avoid commotion? What is to be noted, Is that it is just because we all assume that every chooser has given the problem a thorough thought and since a majority of them arrived at that conclusion, it’s supposed to be the right one indeed.
But that’s not the case. Socrates gave an excellent analogy for this. Let’s suppose a hundred people are on a ship and they need to choose a captain. Is it that the people who have never before been out in the sea get the same say in the matter as the sailors amongst them? It is not. Just because the consequences of a decision affect them, it does not make them eligible to have a say in the matter. It’s not a case of opinion deprivation but just mere sensibility.
Same goes for an electoral process in a democracy. The very essence of democracy is choosing. But choosing from what and by who? From everybody and by everybody and for everybody? It’s just a case where the ship is much bigger. This is the reason for everything that is supposed to be right in a theoretical democracy but is not right in an actual democracy. Where electoral rights are supreme but the electoral duties and responsibilities of the masses find no mention of.
