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The Children’s Menu
Representative democracy is analogous to allowing tiny children to decide what the family will eat for dinner
The Athenian philosopher Plato observed more than 2,500 years ago that democracy — in his day, direct rather than representative — must always end in tyranny because the great mass of people are ignorant and foolish and thus easily gulled by any semi-capable demagogue who chooses to pour honey into their ears. Lest we think Plato was unreasonably pessimistic, we can simply note that after a century of troubled democracy Athens did indeed fall and thereafter remain under the rule of tyrants for precisely the reason Plato stated.
In general, we are a non-inquisitive species. We believe whatever we’re told by purported authority figures and we accept whatever our group norms happen to be as the natural way of things. We humans, in general, have no ability to think. Instead, we merely repeat the tropes and soundbites we’re fed, and we imagine these to be our “opinions.” For most of our species the pre-frontal cortex (where executive reasoning is performed) is barely used at all.
When kings and queens were the norm, we automatically believed that this was the only possible form of social organization and governance. When priests babbled their nonsense about invisible magical pixies…
