Local self-determination, a lessening of alienating influences on our lives, must and will go hand in hand with regional, trans-regional, inter-national, and inter - continental cooperation, or they will not exist, at all.

What local democracy is about is not “collectivism,” it is not conformism, it is not uniformity.

Instead it is expressivity, intelligence, variety, choice.
It is what some of us call ‘individuation’: the fuller, more meaningful developments of individual potentials or capacities.
 

Individualism, today, is often the contrary of individuation. Millions of people thought of them as brandishing a particular, individual style when wearing Roeback shoes, or whatever they were called. Millions think that a hair-style, or style of dressing, a particular car or kind of music they prefer constitutes their individuality and sets them apart from others. If you enjoy these little diversion, alright. But don’t forget there are millions like you. Don’t forget the products that help you define your ‘individual’ style are produced by the millions. Those who devised and marketed them preformulated ‘your’ individual style. You have been largely passive in this, a productive, process. 
 

You have been active only as a ‘consumer,’ a buyer, somebody who is sporting these goods. Don’t forget you have a productive bend, a creative potential, as well. It is in developing this potential that you become a full, mature, or rather, maturing and ‘growing’ individual. This society does not encourage and further the development of individuals. It encourages and  furthers the development of a gullible mass of people: people usable as working people who function in the desires way (instead of thoughtful, self-confident, imaginative producers), people who will make willing, uncritical ‘consumers’ (instead of productive consumers, consuming producers), people who can be manipulated by the media and a caste of professional politicians.
 

Decades ago, an American sociologist called this type of social being (who thinks or may think, in fact, that he or she is ‘very individualistic’) the ‘outer-directed personality.’ For it, outside determination of thought, will, morality by authoritarian institutions (the church,  school, family, army, the factory) has largely been superseded by instant impulses, kicks offered by the entertainment industry, by info-tainment, by more or less ‘populist’ or ‘charismatic’ politicians, fashioned after an image that has been drawn up by experts of modern mass psychology.

Both the outer-directed personality of today’s society and the inner-directed one that was prevalent in much of the 19th and the early 20th century, are ‘ideal types.’
They do not (often) appear in pure form, it seems.

We all carry part of them in us, in greater or lesser proportions. But we also carry a creative urge in us, a desire to be free instead of alienated or manipulated, a capacity to think for ourselves and to act in our best interest while taking care not to disregard the best interest of our fellow men. 

Who is the ‘ordinary citizen’, then?

Perhaps, today, more often than not he is somebody crazy to consume, trapped by the latest craze, impatient that he cannot afford so many things. Somebody hooked by the false promises of a society that has low quality shoes, shoddily produced cars, food produced under the most questionable circumstances, noisy neighborhoods and ugly houses available for almost unaffordable rents for most of us. Today this person, faced with the carrot and the stick of his or her invisible masters (masters invisible as the absentee landlord was frequently invisible for the tenants of another time or country) adapts to the rat-race of anti-cooperative ‘competition’, hoping to chance upon his own lucky streak while in fact what he finds is stress, burn-out, sometimes sickness, and even premature death.

But this same person, tomorrow, may crave something different, may opt for different goals: dignity, decent living and working conditions, a say in his own affairs, friendliness and cooperation among neighbors and work-mates.

THE CITIZENS THAT URBAN DEMOCRACY and SOCIETY-WIDE DEMOCRATIZATION DEPENDS UPON WILL NOT ONLY CHANGE THEIR CIRCUMSTANCES.
THEY ARE ABLE TO CHANGE, THEMSELVES.
BOTH PROCESS ARE NOT NECESSARILY COMPLETELY SYNCHRONIZED; ONE MAY TRACK THE OTHER, AT TIMES; IN OTHER MOMENT, THAT RELATIONSHIP MAY BE REVERSED. 
THE FACT REMAINS THAT CHANGE, AN URGE TO CHANGE, HAS ALREADY SET IN.