DEMOCRACY

As we grow up, we form a mental image of who we are based on our upbringing and cultural conditioning. We may refer to this phantom self the ego. It consists of mental activity and can only be kept going through constant thinking. The term ego means a false self, created by unconscious identification with the mind. It means different things to different people. If you observe your mind, you’ll see that how it works. You do not run your life; the ego runs it. Ego is the unobserved mind that runs your life when you are not present as the witnessing consciousness, the watcher.   Only past and future matter, for ego. The present moment hardly exists for the ego. Only the past and future are considered significant. The mind is so dysfunctional in ego mode, this is due to this complete inversion of the truth. The ego is always concerned with keeping the past alive. Because without past, who are you? It constantly projects itself into the future to ensure its continued s...

Source - NewsClick   1920 - After First World War, the number of democracies in the world had doubled. 1942 - The number of democracies had reduced to 12.  1962 - The number of democracies had grown to 36. 1975 - More than 30 governments had been installed by military coups.   Early 1980s - The number of democracies rose to an astonishing 120.   In political science,  the wave of democracy means the major surge of democracy which have occurred in history.  Till now, three waves of democracy have occurred in history of the world. Put simply, ‘a wave of democracy is a group of transitions from non-democratic regimes to democratic regimes that occur within a specified period of time and that significantly outnumber transitions in the opposite direction’. Democratization often advances in clusters or waves. The wave of democracy has been linked to sudden shifts in the distribution of power among the great powers, ...

Over the last 17 years, the number of countries that receive a score of 0 out of 4 on the media freedom indicator has ballooned from 14 to 33. The media freedom is coming under pressure in at least 157 countries. New coups destabilized Burkina Faso, Tunisia, Peru, and Brazil. Previous years’ coups and ongoing repression continued to diminish basic liberties in Guinea, Turkey, Myanmar, and Thailand.  "A wide definition of democracy is that it is a political system in which those who rule have been obliged to seek consent from those they govern through some sort of council or assembly." But political rulers try to rule as autocrats. Democracy is only valuable as an institutional constraint—that is, to build and maintain a limited state with a wide margin of individual liberty. The most serious setbacks for freedom and democracy were the result of war, coups, and attacks on democratic institutions by illiberal incumbents. Governments used violence and other means to destroy cult...

  Only 9% of the world's population lives in   high-performing democracies. More than a quarter of the world's population   now lives in democracies which are eroding. 70% of the world's population now lives in   either outright non-democratic or democratically backsliding countries.   The absolute number of democracies has been decreasing since 2006. More democracies than ever before are experiencing democratic erosion. The number of democratically regressive countries has never been greater than in the last decade. Democratic erosion is a decline in democratic quality manifested by a statistically significant decline in at least one aspect of democracy. It is the sustained and deliberate subversion of basic democratic tenets by political actors and governments. Democratic erosion  is on the verge of becoming a new type of pandemic. According to various measures of good governance and rule of law, there is an increasing incidence of democratic b...