(89A) Notes on Interdemocracy as a trace
By Onno Hansen-Staszyński | Last Updated: 20 December 2025
In the previous blog post, I described Interdemocracy as a trace. Below there are some thoughts that have emerged since then.
Ma
The Japanese concept of ‘ma’ is the essence of the space between the islands.
· Ma provides the potential for autopoiesis.
· The ocean surrounding the islands is time.
· Interdemocracy provides structured time. It makes the ocean a safe place, not to rest, but to experience time as a constructive confrontation. The structured, non-judgmental, dynamic specification is the Interdemocracy embedding of ma.
Chater
Nick Chater’s theory in The Mind is Flat provides the “hardware” explanation for the trace. If the mind is “flat” it means there is no pre-existing, deep “true self” hidden in a subconscious basement. Instead, the self is something we improvise in real-time.
· Autopoeisis becomes radical improvisation.
· True autonomy is the refusal to let a past improvisation become a label, a permanent cage.
· Since the mind is “flat”, the experience in the now and the memory of past improvisations are all there is. This leaves space for our experience of our psychosocial integration as a self-correction tool for ongoing improvisations.
Hypothesis
Maybe we lived a lie for a long time - as if our self-narrative (Giddens) was the reflection of a stable core that only changed while role-playing in situations (Goffman). Probably, we were ‘liquid’ (Bauman) all along, struggling to reconfigure identity puzzle pieces, without the help of a box that showed an image to model ourselves after (Bauman).
But, unlike Bauman’s interpretation, we are not atomized units, as was the big misunderstanding of the big ideologies of the twentieth century. We are rooted in small, irreducible communities of belonging. Without these communities, our human condition is pathological - loneliness is a destructive state.
The islands provide us with a starter kit for our autonomy. Jealous societal hierarchies, be they religious, ideological, or scientific, try to pin us in a hierarchy by providing us with a box showing a normative picture - and in that picture our little communities have been erased.
We have accepted this situation for a long time, because without a box we are left with our liquid self and the responsibility for our own autonomy, made possible by our islands. This enormous responsibility for ourselves can easily scare us into submission - and it repeatedly did and does.
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