Yet the people must continue to be the powerful beast and this would likely entail running in the wind and with bold expression. It seems to me that this best happens in a personally local atmosphere of interaction and decision with sometimes broad reaching impact and event in the global context.

I think it is and will be difficult for people to not want their opinions to be popular and accepted by what they perceive as a possible majority and to feel that if they aren’t associated in this way this would subsequently make their opinion of less worth, not having sufficient impact the whole body.

People traditionally feel that their opinions must be tested through the filter of the media and big institutional mob-like groups to see if they will hold up under pressure.

This topic strikes at the very core of legitimation (getting public buy-in). I firmly feel that legitimation as society has known it through freedom of speech and public policy is changing and becoming ironically illegitimate or rather unligitimatable. Legitimating, getting the buy-in (“consent”) of ‘the people’ does not seem to fully justify broad action from our leaders when it compromises the unique and increasingly fluid purposes of the different facets of the body. The question is being asked; How is the traditional ‘rule of law’ and ‘social contract’ being adjusted to meet the needs of a populous that is globally affected by local actions and threatened by the natural blindness of specialization?

I believe that a new stillness and emptiness as you say fostered by the up and coming internal interactions from the new personal-relations centric internet-media and this resulting new public anonymity can be an increasingly critical part of the solution.

The ruling masses can never hide this desire from their representatives. This is the basic desire from which the corruptions in our republican government have stemmed. It is inevitable that corruption of the law comes, for the majority of men will always want that tax rebate, or the “free” city park, or the “free” schools, or the “free” sewer systems, or the “free” medical coverage, and on and on.

Only the very best of men and women are able to deny themselves this desire. As the Bible states, the path to life is narrow, and few there be who find it.