Incentives Determine Outcomes

Why qualification-free representative democracy inevitably engenders dysfunction and ultimate collapse

Allan Milne Lees
13 min readApr 17, 2024
Image credit: Freepik

We humans tend to get confused between what we’d like to happen and a realistic comprehension of why things actually turn out as they do. Due to an as-yet not understood series of subtle genetic changes that seem to have occurred long ago in our evolutionary history, we humans live primarily in a world of fantasy and only secondarily (if at all) in a way connected with external reality. This is why most people who have ever lived have believed in invisible magical pixies whose existence is incompatible with everything we know to be true about the universe in which we live. It’s why we doggedly persist in certain actions, always believing that somehow the next time will be different (some call it prayer, some call it gambling). And it’s why most people are very confused about the inevitable outputs generated by our modern-day systems of representative democracy.

As the West is rapidly spiraling down to its ultimate collapse it’s worth looking at why, pace Plato, democracy must always end in tyranny.

It’s a cliché that democracy is like communism: an excellent idea that would work perfectly if only human beings were completely different in every possible way from how we…

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Allan Milne Lees

Anyone who enjoys my articles here on Medium may be interested in my books Why Democracy Failed and The Praying Ape, both available from Amazon.