Watching rising inequality and the growing admiration for brutal power, I find myself questioning assumptions I once held without hesitation. Like many who were born into full democracies, I assumed progress was the natural direction of history. Today’s headlines seem to tell a different story.

According to The Economist’s Democracy Index, only eight percent of the world’s population live in a full democracy. Even if we add the 37 percent who live in so-called “flawed democracies,” it still amounts to less than half of humanity. These statistics leave me feeling deeply unsettled, not just about politics, but about our collective psychological state.

It is this despair, this anxiety, this sense of powerlessness that I want to explore. Because somewhere between indifference and outraged assertiveness, between judgment and moral abdication, between playing the victim or becoming the bully, there must be a sweet spot.

That sweet spot requires us to relearn the art of seeing difficult dilemmas in context, rather than reacting reflexively to emotionally charged content. My personal response to a convulsing world should surely be to inoculate myself against being convulsed by it, to try to remain clear, centred, compassionate, and boundaried. After all, the only democracy I can truly influence is the democracy of my own inner world.

Neither fighting, freezing, nor fleeing

When we become anxious or afraid, we literally become more rigid. Muscles subtly contract as the body prepares to fight, freeze, or flee. The mind narrows into tunnel vision, focused on survival and unable to hold nuance or complexity. Anxiety pushes us into binary thinking: this or that, us or them, right or wrong.

Worse still, the survival system insists that we do something, anything, to escape the discomfort. Impotence is not a word it recognises.

As we scroll through social media, skim headlines, or absorb world events, this mechanism is constantly triggered. We feel compelled to act while simultaneously feeling helpless and overwhelmed.

And while I do believe that what is happening in the world is a genuine call to action, we must pay close attention to the place from which we act. Are we acting from reactive anger, adding to the soup of polarisation? From a posture of indifferent self-victimisation, which makes us easy prey for simplistic, populist solutions? Or from a place of inner balance and clarity?

And if balance is the goal, how do we cultivate it when the world feels increasingly unhinged?

Let’s unpeel this, layer by layer, like an onion.

The outer layer: you and your wider community

How democratic are you in your engagement with the world? How resilient is your mind against being pulled into “them versus us” thinking?

If you feel contaminated by the climate of fear around you, take better care of your mental health. Pause. Breathe deeply. Re-regulate your nervous system. (For practical suggestions, see my article Are you okay?)

This is not about indifference to suffering. It is about being able to hold suffering without falling into the pit of despair alongside those who are suffering. From that pit, you cannot help anyone.

The next layer: your immediate family

How open have you been recently to the voices around your kitchen table? Who are you consciously, or unconsciously, censoring? Can you sit with the painful reality that people close to you may be inhabiting very different worlds?

Listening to the world the “other” inhabits does not mean abandoning your own values. But you can only truly listen when you are centred in your own sovereign self, when you trust that hearing another perspective will not dissolve your own.

Yes, this is hard. But if the young Jewish and Muslim founders of Deel de Duif can do it, so can we.

I often remind parents of teenagers that rebellious young people need to be heard, and that hearing is not the same as agreeing. When you are whole within yourself, you cannot be split by another’s opinion.

The inner layer: the sovereign self

The final layer leads us to the seat of inner sovereignty: the internal CEO, the conductor of the orchestra, the charioteer holding the reins. Neuropsychologists sometimes refer to this inner multiplicity as the inner parliament. The key question is: who is chairing the meeting?

We all play many roles. We are someone’s child; some of us are parents. We may be caregivers in one context and competitors in another. Each role comes with its own skills and emotional patterns.

You might access deep patience and wisdom as a parent, yet revert to a reactive childhood role when sitting with siblings. You may be disciplined and principled at work, then abandon those qualities entirely in social settings. None of this is wrong, but much of it is unconscious.

If you want to take your contribution to healing this fractured world seriously, and arguably the only contribution you can make, then reflect on your inner roles, their skill sets, and the imbalance of power between them.

Awareness is self-empowering. The self-parts we remain unaware of have power over us. Like mini-dictators, they seize the baton and dominate the orchestra. The inner critic, the perfectionist, or the judging part can flood the system with anxiety and self-loathing, drowning out more compassionate voices.

The parts we recognise and befriend, however, can become valuable collaborators, held within awareness by a sovereign, witnessing self. This awareness restores choice. It frees us from survival-based either/or thinking and opens up inner space.

Doing your bit

This inner democracy not only supports mental wellbeing; it also ensures that when we do act in the world, we act from wholeness rather than reactivity. We respond rather than react.

Because reaction spreads the contamination. Even the noblest project, seeded with anxiety and distrust, will continue to generate anxiety and distrust.

What the world needs is for each of us to cultivate enough self-love to find that sweet spot: between indifference and idealism, between victimhood and aggression. To see context rather than merely reacting to content. To listen to all voices, inside ourselves and out, and especially the ones we find uncomfortable or frightening. To say “I don’t know” more often. To remain in that uneasy space of not knowing.

And ultimately, to become a living example of democracy, carrying its principles not as a slogan, or as a lazy naive assumption, but as a way of being.

Before you close this article and return to your day, I invite you to pause for a moment.

Take one slow breath and ask yourself: Which voice inside me has been loudest lately? The fearful one? The outraged one? The exhausted one? Or perhaps the one that wants to withdraw altogether.

Now ask yourself a second question: What would it feel like to let a wiser, steadier part of me chair the meeting, just for today?

Inner democracy is not a fixed state; it is a daily practice. It is cultivated in moments like this, when we choose awareness over reactivity, curiosity over certainty, and presence over paralysis. The world may continue to convulse. But every time we refuse to be convulsed along with it, we quietly strengthen the conditions for something more humane to emerge.