Saramago's Democracy: Truth or Fiction?
What if in the next election, you went to the polls, and instead of marking your ballot, you left it blank? What if thousands of other citizens did the same? How would the government react? The media? Your neighbours?
This is the scenario that Jose Saramago draws up and explores in his novel Seeing - the follow up to Blindness.
The novel is a harsh criticism on modern day democracies and several different aspects of the democratic process: the police, the law, the government, voting, political parties, the media, freedom of speech and the right to assemble.
In Saramago’s fictitious capital city, the government decides to punish its citizens by relocating to all government agencies and ministries to the suburbs, bringing with them the police and military, and building a security wall around the city centre. The goal was to allow chaos to slowly ensue in the capital, a place now void of law enforcement and political authourity.
The opposite happens.
The citizens unite, start to clean up their own streets, and surprisingly, life goes on...
The only mayhem that occurs is within the government itself, where a group of powerful individuals become increasingly frustrated and incapable of comprehending how a society can function without any established forms of supervision.
At times, the novel serves as an excellent reminder of why it is important to defend people and institutions whose mandate it is to continue to question authourity. At some points, it is a fictional representation of a mad man who is fatalistic in the way he sees politics and its interaction with the populace. At other points, at least in my case, you want to throw the book against the wall and give up.
Combined, however, it is a must-read for anyone who has ever looked at declining voter turnouts in Western democracies and asked themselves: when are we going to finally start counting all these blank ballots?