Allan Milne Lees
1 min readJul 20, 2023

--

The truth is that democracy is a truly terrible idea when considering how to organize life in a complex technological rapidly-changing world. The average person knows nothing and understands less. The human brain is hardwired to seek simplicity, but reality is always complex. Asking ordinary people their opinion on any topic of importance will always yield extremely low-quality responses. Imagining that ordinary people should have any input to important national decisions is therefore insane. Brexit succeeded because the cynics who promoted it knew two mindless soundbites would sway a majority of ignorant foolish people. As a result, Brexiteers flushed the UK down the toilet. Intelligent well-informed people knew Brexit would be a catastrophe, but such people are always everywhere in a minority. It's no good regretting having done something utterly stupid when it's too late. And that's why we need to look for far better approaches to governance, because democracy is carrying us inexorably toward the end of our civilization, just as Plato pointed out would be the case, more than 2,500 years ago.

--

--

Allan Milne Lees
Allan Milne Lees

Written by 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.

No responses yet