Continued:

“The astonishment of confronting the pain and suffering of other human beings can be sought only in literature.”

It is clear why despotic governments intervene in language and, by making words single-voiced, take from individuals within that society the possibility of creating thought, whereas society in its natural form, as Bakhtin is presented here as saying, should be polyphonic, multilingual and open to multiple meanings. From this perspective Bakhtin also sees justice as something realised through such plurality. What causes human suffering in its social dimension, in this view, is being ignored in discourses and narratives. Despotism too can be defined from this perspective. Despotism is not simply the absence of freedom. Despotism is treating other human beings as superfluous: human beings whose voices have been removed from discourse, whose needs and sufferings are neither seen nor heard, whose pain evokes no feeling in others, until society becomes indifferent and inactive toward them. With a little reflection, one can clearly see manifestations of this indifference in people’s everyday behaviour. What could empty us of our humanity to such a degree and prepare the ground for evil and falsehood to enter society?

If we accept that the time has come for us to act ourselves, rather than waiting for democracy and justice to be realised solely through changing rulers, the best place to begin is by rebuilding our connections with language, because no change in our social life is possible without attention to language and its functions. The production of democracy in society is not a one-way flow descending from rulers to nations. In its genuine form it is the result of discourses moving within the depths of social consciousness and becoming filled with meanings and with Others. Through the “Others” who enter them, such discourses become just discourses in which the voices of all social groups and strata are heard equally and no voice dominates another. It is the minds of people in such a society that become intertexts: dynamic and generative fields that prepare the ground for creating thought, consciousness and knowledge—everything a society needs for flourishing and development.