This is the most prescient article I’ve read on our current political situation. You are, I believe, perfectly correct in your analysis. The reason we humans are such simpletons and prefer entertainment over content is because our little brains aren’t adapted to cope with the complexities of the modern world. Our technologies now amplify this incapacity to the point where the consequences can no longer be glossed over.

So the big question, therefore, becomes: now that representative democracy has failed so spectacularly and is leading us down the path to tyranny, as Plato explained it would more than 2,500 years ago, with what do we replace it?

In a world in which we expect people to demonstrate competence before being granted the right to drive, to fly aircraft, to perform surgery, to install plumbing, and a million other tasks, perhaps it’s time to realize we need to require demonstrated competence before allowing a person to vote.

And we also need to ask, now that the “tyranny of distance” no longer exists thanks to the Internet, whether we even need representatives at all? After all, they only came into being because nations were too large to permit direct democracy. It would be impossible for a million or more people to come together on a regular basis to debate and decide. Today that constraint is gone. Perhaps representatives should likewise disappear so that ordinary citizens who have shown competence can debate and decide directly, without the interference of unqualified representatives whose primary focus is always on remaining in office by any means feasible rather than on doing what is best for the people they purport to represent.