At the moment, I am working on some two or three projects, amongst which is the second issue of Malta at the European Court of Human Rights. It should be out in the coming months, the first issue having sold out.

So, last weekend I decided to finally read an article I had long been intending to read, by the late American so-called philosopher Richard Rorty, on human rights. I say "so-called" because on reading his essay on why sentimentality rather than morality should be the driving force behind a human-rights utopia, I realised that Rorty was more of an ideologue than a philosopher. He essentially urged his readers to teach sentimentality to youngsters, as this was the surest way to promote the (uncritical) acceptance of the standard liberal set of values such as non-traditional marriage, abortion and the like.

Then, driving back home one evening, I happened to listen to Ozzy Osbourne singing his sixth-form style The Dreamer, and it suddenly dawned on me why I disliked Rorty so much. His supposedly philosophical essay on human rights and Ozzy's song were on the same level, and it wasn't Ozzy who had soared.

And yet, this is what is happening at the moment. Complex issues are simplified and reduced to a level similar to that of popular music lyrics and, like pop songs, the simplified message is repeated over and over again, steam-rolling any attempt at sober and rational analysis.

And not only that. Expert opinion is shunned as experts, who usually dwell on issues in their full complexity, are accused of living in ivory towers. It is true that some experts are more ideologues than real experts, but many others are not. You catch the ideologue when you see that someone is putting forward controversial stances as if they were settled principles. The real expert tends to alert the interlocutor to the controversial nature of controversial stances.

There are two solutions to the problem of public exposure to expert opinions. Either an intermediary (the "public thinker") takes it upon him-or-herself to negotiate between the expert and the general public, or else the expert plays a dual role, being both expert and public thinker. If we were to look at Malta as an example, somebody who is playing this delicate dual role at the moment is Dean of the Faculty of Laws Kevin Aquilina.

Why Professor Aquilina's dual role is important can be intuited from the fact that, in the current climate, the country needs experts and public thinkers to stir up a debate on a thorough rethinking of the basic law and setup of the state, possibly coming up with autochthonous solutions. Kevin Aquilina is one of the few who has felt this calling and he has been regularly feeding the public intellectually-nutritious nuggets of legal thinking, adapted for general (as opposed to specialist) consumption.

I think that the learned professor is doing a fine job because he is, little by little, creating a coherent theory of government which uses real events as the prompt for proposing practical principles. The balance he seems to be striking is, to my mind, the right one because I believe that history teaches that top-down ideological revolutions rarely last long, whereas bottom-up reforms built on experience seem to withstand the test of time. (By bottom-up, however, I mean done through experts - in this case, since it's the constitutional setup, by lawyers, as has been the case all over Western Europe in the past, both near and distant.)

The need for a conversation between the experts and the public thinkers on the one side and the general public on the other is felt by many members of the thinking public. Particularly because of what is being perceived as the increasing presidentialisation of parliamentary politics which, in turn, fuels the personalisation of political structures meant to deal with a setup of another nature.

The increasing personalisation of party leadership - and voters' identification with leaders - is neither a new phenomenon nor is it peculiar to any one place. Despite formal structures, the natural tendency of all societies is towards such collective behaviour. That said, let us not forget that although the ability to speak is common to all humans, each collective has its own language. In other words, the same phenomena manifest themselves in different ways among different groups of human beings. Just consider: all humans live in houses, but architectural expression and grammar differs from one group to another.

The point, however, is that the natural tendency to deify leaders has to be reflected in the constitutional setup of the country, in the sense that mechanisms must be in place whereby excessive personalisation can be curbed - if society is to remain democratic, that is. Power attracts narcissists, in whose case superego brakes either do not exist or do not work properly. Narcissists therefore tend to seduce people in order to manipulate them, and to misuse institutions for their own exploitative purposes. The dangers include Caudillisimo and even a return, in disguise, of the absolute monarch. It follows that presidentialist democracies have to have checks and balances, such as the rule prohibiting re-election after a maximum number of terms.

In presidential systems, the president is the chief of the executive branch of the State, which is directly elected by the people, and does not depend on the confidence of the democratically-elected representatives in parliament. The president lays full claim to democratic legitimacy with strong plebiscitarian bases. This brings in its wake a zero sum game mentality, in which the winner takes all, further exacerbating polarisation.

Some countries have de jure presidentialism; the United States is one such example and, despite the latent potential for conflict between the executive branch led by the President and the legislative branch which also has popular legitimacy, the constitutional setup manages to avoid full-blown conflict. In other countries governed through the presidentialist system it is not unknown for the army to intervene in order to moderate power.

But some other countries have de facto presidentialism, therefore lacking any institutional controls and brakes.

Clearly, there is a segment of any population for whom all of this is airy-fairy because it can relate only to Ozzy Osbourne's The Dreamer and the like. Another segment understands completely but prefers to keep looking at the ledger. It thus falls upon the remaining segments to roll up their sleeves. The harvest is plentiful but the labourers are few. And, since nowhere is it written that life is fair, the fruits of their labour and sweat will be enjoyed by the Ozzy crowd and the ledger people. But that's life, and the public-spirited know it.