Not all human creation is conscious; for most of our lives, we create without specific intent, and often we discover that we have created something without realizing we had done so. This is true even, and especially, in science: Daniel Boorstein, former president of the US Library of Congress, showed that many inventions were made by accident.(1) This can be verified throughout the entire history of humanity, not only in recent written history, but in the history of our most ancient ancestors.

Democracy is a creation of man; it was not a creation of politics, nor because of politics, nor for politics. Man created politics unintentionally and without any intention; it was born from himself as an individual. It is born and reborn, and in our day it continues to be so when we live with other people. There are, in fact, several types of democracy: we all know that each family has, within itself, a set of rules that are not the same in all other families; in one, the model of the sovereign and loving father is natural because of his human qualities; in another, this sovereignty is imposed, with more or less force.

Democracy, therefore, was not born in ancient Greece, nor even in the tens of thousands of years before that time. What the Greece of the “Greek miracle” represents is the antiquity of written democracy. Democracy is much, much older, dating back hundreds of thousands of years.

Man, in the time when he lived in bands, already had his democratic model. Take the film “Quest for Fire”: the band of protagonists had already mastered fire, keeping it burning day and night with a small flame maintained with resins; this type of band, without absolute control of fire, was constantly on edge, and when they lost their fire, the easiest, or only, way to get it back was to steal it from another band. But another band, which lived further away in a less humid climate, was much more evolved: it had complete control over fire because it had created a system of rubbing sticks together with their hands to produce fire. The first band, about fifteen to twenty individuals, had a rudimentary model of organization: three of them stood out, one by seniority was the informal leader and advisor because of his age; one who kept the piece of trunk with small stones where he kept the fire burning safe and therefore slept with it; and another younger and above all stronger one who was responsible for directing the defense against attacks by animals and other groups. In other words, the democratic model of this primitive society was informal but assertive, without leaders but with a combined order of security and well-being. They had no awareness that they were living in a democracy. They did not know that their autonomous “self” of survival and need for coexistence imposed on them this democratic necessity that we, thousands of years later, call democracy, that is, the natural need that man (and, ultimately, all life) has to organize itself. The second group, more evolved, did not value fire as much because they had already mastered it entirely; they had other concerns: they valued women and men with better reproductive capacity because they knew that their survival depended on the number of individuals; this way they were better protected from other groups and animals. This group, therefore, had, as can be seen, other rules of operation. But they did not know that they lived in a democracy, or even that such a thing existed.

Since we are talking about democracy, we are therefore talking about humans living in bands, the oldest form of social coexistence among humans. Even in very small groups of three or seven individuals, the process is identical. At this stage of humanity, humans, in terms of democracy, had a collective intelligence—like ants do—but did not have individual intelligence in the sense of creating group rules as a method of survival.

Democracy, therefore, was born there: at the moment when the human group creates behaviors (rules) to achieve certain ends for itself and for others, personal and collective ends, and then personal autonomy informally delegates part of its will and interests to collective autonomy.Politics would emerge much later: when humans, already in a phase of transition from informal chiefdoms to tribes, became fully aware of the need to create complex power structures, distinguishing the group dedicated exclusively to the management of the human collective as a whole. This is where politics was born. Humanity in the band did not dream, imagine, think, or know that it was democracy. He would only realize this much later, perhaps from the transition from band society to tribal society with the creation of politics.(2)

The discovery, through science in our modern times, that living beings, and with them man, who is also nature and a living being, have within themselves a system (homeostasis) that includes the ability to stay alive without human intervention, can be confusing: one thing is homeostasis, which is biology in everything; quite different is the idea of autopoiesis linked to human autonomy, here no longer just biology, but the processes of individual self-determination, a mixture of biology and human reason that Karl Popper calls the Second World. (3) Through normative sociology, we can see, as illustrated above, that norms predate the awareness that norms exist. That is: man is normative by nature because he uses rules of personal or social coexistence in everything, just as the universe functions according to rules.

The history of ideas and perceptions, which is much older than any type of word created by man, cannot be confused with the history of the creation of names, which is a recent development, and even less can it be confused with Azorean political autonomy. Modern man is already further ahead; we no longer discuss homeostasis or autopoiesis to discover the normative-political man because that is the ABC of knowledge; but only the political autonomy of the Azores, and how we are going to develop it to a higher quality by taking advantage of this normative-political wedge, rising from the common man to the citizen.

(1) In the monumental work Os descobridores (The Discoverers). (2) The two monumental works: The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama and The Strange Order of Things by António Damásio. To understand ancient knowledge and thought, the following minimum reading is essential: Aristotle’s Politics and The Constitution of the Athenians; Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws and Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness and Decline of the Romans; The Prince, by Machiavelli; On the Dignity of Man, by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola; The Ancient City, by Numa-Denys Fustel de Coulanges; The History of Government, by S. E. FINER; The Bread of the Gods: In Search of the Original Tree of Knowledge, by Terence McKenna.(3) The first is the physical world, of material things; the second is the world of emotions; and the third is the world of the objective products of humanity. In the philosophical monument In Search of a Better World, the entire work, but at least the chapter “Knowledge and the Formation of Reality: The Search for a Better World.”

In Diário Insular, José Lourenço-director

Arnaldo Ourique is a specialist on the Portuguese Constitution and the Azorean Autonomy. A researcher in the fields of Politics and Society.

NOVIDADES will feature occasional opinion pieces from various leading thinkers and writers in the Azores, providing the diaspora and those interested in the current state of the Azores with insight into the diverse opinions on some of the archipelago’s key issues.