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Beyond Democracy
Why we need to attempt to think instead of passively repeating soundbites
I recently wrote an article here on Medium called Why Democracy Always Fails, in which I outlined the fundamental systemic problems with the concept of representative democracy and why it cannot be tinkered with to produce meaningful improvements. I explained why democracy always eventually results in populism, which can be essentially summed up as cynical demagogues telling lies to ignorant foolish people in order to gain and retain power. The results of democracy have been catastrophic, but we continue to tell ourselves fairytales in order to avoid having to think about the problem. In fact, we distort reality to the degree that we imagine many of our self-induced catastrophes to be magnificent triumphs. World War II is a prime, but by far from unique, example of this particular trend.
Not surprisingly, I received in the comments section the usual soundbite-instead-of-thinking responses: democratic nations are more economically successful than dictatorships, the democracies “whupped the Nazis” in WWII, and so on. In other words, many readers were unable to engage with the core argument. One respondent even took issue with my analogy of passengers on a commercial aircraft voting to elect the pilot, saying that this doesn’t happen in real life because the results…
