Democracy? is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike. (Plato).

Democracy may be familiar to most but it is a concept still misunderstood and misused in a time when totalitarian regimes and military dictatorships alike have attempted to claim popular support by pinning democratic labels upon themselves.

Yet the power of the democratic idea has also evoked some of history's most profound expressions of human will and intellect. In the dictionary definition, democracy ?is government by the people in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system.?

Freedom and democracy are often used interchangeably, but the two are not synonymous. Democracy is a set of ideas and principles about freedom, but it also consists of a set of practices and procedures that have been moulded through a long, often tortuous history. In short, democracy is institutionalized freedom.

All democracies are systems in which citizens freely make political decisions by majority rule. But rule by the majority is not necessarily democratic: no one, for example, would call a system fair that permitted 51 percent of the population to oppress the remaining 49 percent in the name of the majority.

In a democratic society, majority rule must be coupled with guarantees of individual human rights that, in turn, serve to protect the rights of minorities ? whether ethnic, religious, or political, or simply the losers in the debate over a piece of controversial legislation.

The rights of minorities do not depend upon the goodwill of the majority and cannot be eliminated by majority vote. The rights of minorities are protected because democratic laws and institutions protect the rights of all citizens.

Power in a democracy is the power to communicate and build a working consensus. Only when the public knows what it thinks as a whole can it confidently communicate a working consensus back to its elected representatives. An informed public can be trusted.

Democracy is more than a set of constitutional rules and procedures that determine how a government functions. In a democracy, government is only one element coexisting in a social fabric of many and varied institutions, political parties, organizations, and associations. This diversity is called pluralism, and it assumes that the many organized groups and institutions in a democratic society do not de-pend upon government for their legitimacy, or authority.

A conscious democracy requires the active consent of the governed, not simply their passive acquiescence. Involving citizens does not guarantee that the "right" choices will always be made; however, it does assure that citizens will feel involved and invested in those choices. Rather than feeling cynical or powerless, citizens will feel engaged and responsible for society and its future.

A conscious democracy em-powered by the creative use of mass communication can res-pond to the momentous challenges facing our planet. Perhaps the biggest challenge facing humanity in this global era is to evolve the art and practice of conscious democracy.

In this busy realm of democratic society, citizens can explore the possibilities of freedom and the responsibilities of self-government -unpressured by the potentially heavy hand of the state.