THE CONCEPTUAL FRAUD OF REPRESENTATION: THE IRRESPONSIBLE USE OF THE TERM DEMOCRACY AS A MASK FOR INSTITUTIONAL COLLAPSE

ABSTRACT Contemporary political debate and global media narratives repeatedly incur a devastating terminological fallacy: qualifying the collapse of the representative system as a "crisis of democracy." This analysis demonstrates that identifying representation with democracy constitutes an untenable oxymoron and an act of profound intellectual irresponsibility. Democracy—scientifically understood as the direct and active inclusion of the citizenry in state decision-making through the referendum, the plebiscite, the public forum, the popular consultation, and popular election by lot (sortition) — has never entered the historical stage. All institutional crises, ethical degradation, party tyrannies, and warlike conflagrations erroneously attributed to "democracy" are, in reality, the legitimate and exclusive offspring of the representative system. Perpetuating this confusion is not a mere linguistic error, but a mechanism of ideological manipulation that seeks to protect the reigning partitocracy at the expense of defaming the only real path to human emancipation: Direct Participation.