Deep democracy

This article is about the concept of Deep democracy as used in Arnold Mindell's social and psychological theories; it is different from the term used in Theory of Deep Democracy, a more general theory extending the theory of democracy in a more specifically political way.
The term Deep Democracy was developed by the psychologist Arny Mindell, and is a methodology developed to foster a deeper level of dialogue and inclusivity. It is a psycho-social-political paradigm, which first appeared in print in 1988 in the book Leader as Martial Artist.
The Concept
Deep Democracy is a key concept of Process Work, a paradigm that was developed by Mindell during the 1960s at the Jung Institute in Switzerland. Process Work integrates concepts from quantum physics, psychology, anthropology, and spirituality into a new paradigm and methodology that has many applications. Mindell defines process as the constant flow of information contained in the flow of events that are connected by a deeper meaning that organizes human experience and can be found in many universal laws. Process Work is a universal approach with applications in collective transformation (change management), individual transformation (psychotherapy), medicine, physics, law, politics, leadership development, and art.
He coined the term Deep Democracy in 1988 to describe the importance of developing awareness of and appreciation for all levels of experience. The concept reinterprets quantum mechanics in terms of the relationship between an observer, an event, and the method of observation. It is a radical way to think about reality and is intended to show the limitations of scientific and philosophical models that try to explain reality, pointing out how those models focus on single-dimensional aspects of a multi-dimensional reality ,and fall short of addressing the phenomena of all dimensions.
He formulates the process of observation on three separate awareness levels: the measurable, objective, and readily expressible part of our experience; the non-measurable, subjective, and expressible part; and the deepest, inexpressible part. Deep Democracy recognizes the basically equal importance of consensus reality issues and concerns (facts, issues, problems, people), dreamland figures (roles, ghosts, directions), and the essence (common ground) that connects everyone. It shows how we can experience the universe more fully, helping us to understand our reality better, by equally valuing all of the various aspects of our awareness.
For example, Deep Democracy includes the idea that in a community building process all voices and roles; which includes our collective experiences of altered states, subtle feelings, behavioral and somatic tendencies; bring valuable information that helps us to discover a hidden process that is organizing community dynamics. Awareness of the background process is needed in order to find sustainable resolutions to community or organizational problems. Focusing on immediate goals is good, but including information available in the deeper levels of our awareness brings the most stability to the system.
Deep Democracy has had an enormous impact in many areas over the last twenty years. The concept of Deep Democracy is now being used by many scientists, social activists, politicians, transpersonal psychologists, and organizational development communities. Many individuals and groups and even many political leaders have studied with us and are applying these concepts within their own fields. Many politicians have also started to use the concept, including the US consumer rights advocate Ralph Nader and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Several groups have intuitively isolated one single-dimension of the broad multi-dimensional theory of Deep Democracy, for example, the realization that majorities cannot sustainably rule over minorities for a sustainable buy-in process, or that democracy must also include a feeling level in order to be sustainable. Although the fact that these groups sometimes use the term "Deep Democracy" to describe just one limited aspect can be confusing, it is nevertheless a sign of the power of the complete paradigm, and therefor can be viewed as a welcome development. Even the application of one or two single dimensions of the original theory can help people discover how process organizes life and how the flow of process has a self-organizing direction of its own, all with its own innate wisdom.
Concept of Processwork
Mindell calls his paradigm Processwork, which formulates these principles and demonstrates how they can be used in psychotherapy. In the late eighties he started to formulate them as a political principle that he called Deep Democracy. Unlike "classical" democracy, which focuses on majority rule, Deep Democracy suggests that all voices, states of awareness, and frameworks of reality are important, and are all needed to understand the complete process of the political system. The attitude focuses on the awareness of voices that are both central and marginal. Mindell describes the "experience of Deep Democracy as a process of flow in which all actors on the stage are needed to create the play that we are watching". Numerous attempts to implement Deep Democracy are occurring simultaneously throughout the world. The concept of openness to diversity and dialogue between various views doesn’t mean that the facilitator is a pushover—that is only one metaskill (although it often reflects a lack of awareness). Facilitators must also at times practise, embody, and express other metaskills such as toughness, anger, intractability, love, detachment, concern for the well being of the others, and a genuine desire to achieve consensus. Some of the metaskills in that list are organic responses. However, when a facilitator uses her internal organic responses to better inform her intervention, that is a metaskill. This is the reason why the human development—the internal psychological and spiritual growth and inner peace—of the facilitator is so important.
The most fundamental forum is your own heart. Both as a facilitator and as a human being, you must learn to hear yourself there. Arnold Mindell, Sitting in the Fire
The idea of supporting a deeper dialogue has been around at least since Plato argued for the inclusion of women in public discourse. Athens needed the intelligence of all and couldn't afford not to accept women as thinkers and leaders. Even if Plato didn't expand his thinking enough to extend that acceptance to slaves, other races, and other than the upper classes of women, he planted a cultural seed that needed another twenty-five hundred years to sprout and is only now coming to fruition in culturally creative ways.
At its deepest manifestation, Deep Democracy, refers to an openness towards the views of other people and groups, and also embraces an openness to emotions and personal experiences, which tend to get excluded from conflict and rational public discourse.
One novel formulation called structural deep democracy, uses deep democracy as an algorithm, equating trust and consent with network centrality. By rating the pagerank of votes, using this as a transitive proxy voting algorithm, yielding a social network optimization methodology, is postulated to equate centrality with leadership ability. However, strange and point attractors other than trust and consent may also correlate with node centrality.
University of Texas at Austin Professor Particia A. Wilson says, "At its essence, deep democracy is the inner experience of interconnectedness.” “From a systems perspective, deep democracy is an open dynamic system springing from the diverse points of engagement where individuals and community come together." The symbiotic connection between democracy and human development is an aspect of Deep Democracy but attempts to formally define deep democracy often result in formation of a procedural approach. For example, one economist suggests, "Deep Democrfacy and economic justice, therefore, can be presented as a coherent set of positive requirements," but that approach may not relate to self-organizing tendencies, potentially meaningful synchronicities, non-linear and non-local experience, and the more subtle concepts and experiences that Mindell's original conception discussed.<ref name=AM1992LMA />
Free Speech
There are many views about what Deep Democracy is; no one view expresses the Deep Democracy viewpoint. However, in terms of free speech, the general idea is that freedom of speech means that people should feel free to express any view, which Deep Democracy would frame in a particular way. From one understanding of Deep Democracy, it says that when someone expresses one role; no matter how important, wise, true, or needed; they often are also momentarily marginalizing other views or roles. One dimension of Deep Democracy stresses the importance of the other roles. Another dimension stresses the importance of developing awareness of the tension between the various roles. Another dimension stresses the importance of exploring, caring for, or at least noticing how our expression of these various roles leads to tensions in our interpersonal, organization, or community relationships. In short, Deep Democracy supports the important of free speech and also the importance of developing awareness of content aspects of various roles as well as the psychological aspects of various roles (tyrant, oppressor, defender, social activist, etc.)<ref name=AM1992LMA />

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