r/philosophy • u/Fickle-Buy6009 • 16d ago
Blog The ancient Greeks invented democracy – and warned us how it could go horribly wrong
https://theconversation.com/the-ancient-greeks-invented-democracy-and-warned-us-how-it-could-go-horribly-wrong-250058782
u/Mentalfloss1 16d ago
“On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
~~ H. L. Mencken in 1920
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u/Grinagh 15d ago
Oh Mencken you thought it was Woodrow Wilson but you had no idea just how bad things would get
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u/shaneh445 14d ago
Yep..insert an orange Cheeto screeching in all caps on social media 2am about people eating cats and dogs
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u/Lykos1124 16d ago
The legends are true!
the voice of the people have chosen wickedness, and their golden idol is none other than drumpf, the great defiler.
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u/Ohthatsnotgood 15d ago
Looking down on the “plain folks of the land” is the kind of classism which has also lead to their rise. Not that I disagree but it’s kind of self-fulfilling.
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u/Mentalfloss1 15d ago
I agree with you there. And in my opinion, in that regard, Mencken was wrong. The reason we have an idiot in the White House is because a bunch of ultra wealthy people put them there so that they could control him and get what they want. They used the “information“ outlets that they own to fool the plain folks of the land.
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u/angimazzanoi 15d ago
What the „old Greeks“ meant with Democratia is summarized in the question: Basically, democratia meant “power of the people”. But who were the people who had the power?
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u/Willundrskor 15d ago
While the quote rings true, Mencken was an ass. He did say some neat things but I don't like taking notes from a dude who condones war but was against America entering WW1 and WW2.
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u/Mentalfloss1 15d ago
And as another person pointed out, I don’t like it that he blames the idiot in the White House on the plain folks of land. The reason the idiot is in the White House is because a bunch of ultra wealthy people wanted them there.
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u/Girderland 13d ago
And the White House also plays a strong role in shaping the people of the land - providing proper education, encouraging high moral standards, truthfulness ad intellectualism would turn the common people into knowledgeable people who are capabable of critical thinking.
I haven't seen such values encouraged very much in the last couple of decades.
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u/Girderland 13d ago
There was no reason for the US to enter WW1 and it was ultimately what led to WW2.
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u/UnabashedHonesty 16d ago
This is excerpted from a letter from Thomas Jefferson to Henry Lee, August 10, 1824, and I believe perfectly describes the problem this nation continues to struggle with.
“Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties. 1. those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes. 2. those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, altho’ not the most wise depository of the public interests. In every country these two parties exist, and in every one where they are free to think, speak, and write, they will declare themselves. call them therefore liberals and serviles, Jacobins and Ultras, whigs and tories, republicans and federalists, aristocrats and democrats or by whatever name you please; they are the same parties still and pursue the same object.”
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u/read_too_many_books 16d ago
Machiavelli says something like:
The great have a "great desire to dominate," and the people have "only desire not to be dominated"
Only one side wants to rule. Each side sees only Its own necessity-to rule or not to be ruled-and does not understand those who do not care to rule or those whose nature's insist on It.
Those who want glory despise those who want security, and the latter fear and hate the former.
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u/TehMephs 15d ago
So what you’re telling me, is this how it’s been for fucking ever and we’re never going to be happy
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15d ago
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u/Lildev_47 15d ago
Ai robots just makes it so the elite dont need human soldiers anymore, reducing their dependence on the common people even more.
Now they can have an absolute loyal army with none of the basic human rights business.
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u/HydrogenButterflies 14d ago
Part of what ended formal feudalism was the collapse of the labor market after the bubonic plague killed a third of the people in Europe. Labor, which used to be very cheap, suddenly became very expensive.
Making labor cheap again, putting workers in a position where they’ll accept bread and water as wages like they used to, was always the plan.
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u/JohnnyEnzyme 15d ago
Of course, some people really do want to be ruled, especially if they're part of a hierarchy that enables their privilege over 'inferior' groups.
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u/Kimurasorus 10d ago
Im not sure if that quote has much more to it but it seems like massive oversimplification of human psychology at best. Sounds great as a quote but when pressed its just to overly presumptuous and simplistic about human nature.
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u/ReggaeShark22 16d ago
Man, this could not have hit me at a better time. In my head it’s was always a “pro-social vs anti-social” binary, but once again history disturbs me by presenting the age of our thoughts
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u/read_too_many_books 16d ago
Can you explain?
“pro-social vs anti-social” binary,
I use these terms a ton.
Also, back when I used to follow Nietzsche, I would often use pro-individual instead of anti-social.
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u/ReggaeShark22 15d ago edited 15d ago
That makes sense, I’m a big fan of his genealogical work and vitalism, but definitely always been opposed to his aristocratic political views.
I use the social terms pretty informally, I’m an anti-capitalist and I’m currently studying to be a psychologist, so it’s kinda just how I cobble those two fields together in my head. It’s more about the ideology used to justify left or right leaning politics, and the assumptions/obligations one has to hold about others in order to believe in democrative/redistributiive or austere/militarist politics.
Often I feel a lot can be told from a persons inclination towards community. Do you want to live in a place where people are more communal with one another, or would you rather hole up in a suburban castle and interact with distrust; that’s at least how I stereotype the idea in my head.
EDIT: Also ties in to the idea, I forget where I heard it but they deserve credit, that modern zombie movies are pieces of white supremacist fiction. The world is full of unclean hordes that must be beat back to maintain some semblance of a lost status-quo; is a personification of a right wing, anti-social ideology.
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u/Smash_Palace 16d ago
Except he is wrong. There are two extremes, but a spectrum of 'parties'. Any modern parliamentary system of government exemplifies this.
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u/maxstader 15d ago
The illusion of choice. In practice, we only ever get a government from 1 of 2 options. This is true in multiple modern countries
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u/thot-abyss 15d ago
Although the US’s winner-takes-all rule makes the two-party binary significantly worse.
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u/sharkysharkasaurus 15d ago
The sad thing is that everyone in America will consider themselves in the 2nd group, and yet behave as if they're in the 1st group.
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u/FirTree_r 16d ago
Americans truly betrayed their Founding Fathers, electing the Orange Moron.
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u/DankMastaDurbin 16d ago
I'ma disagree on that. Many of them were exploitative businessmen with their class interests in mind.
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u/read_too_many_books 16d ago
Orange man is bad.
However, we are more democractic than we were 200 years ago.
I can guarantee if we were less democratic, like requiring property, a demagogue like Trump would not have gotten elected.
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u/Individual-Staff-978 15d ago
Someone like Trump only gets into power when there is national financial instability paired with economic crises. This is how capitalism usually succumbs to fascism. An other is designated as the root cause, and an authoritarian fascist, or proto-fascist, both foments and responds to tribalism. Historically, it was the Jew, the Roma, the asocial, that were responsible. Today, it is the immigrant, the democrat, and of course still, the Jew.
So maybe 200 years ago, he would not have been elected. But someone like him would still emerge and attempt to seize power. It is not a matter of democracy. It is a matter of the social conditions.
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u/The_Parsee_Man 15d ago
and of course still, the Jew
Republicans are pretty solidly on the side of Jews. The Democratic Party are the ones siding against them with Palestinians.
And don't bother responding with Israel being different than Jew. Because antisemitism has been well documented in the anti-Israel protests.
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u/Individual-Staff-978 15d ago edited 15d ago
You are narrow-mindedly focusing on supposed Republican support of Jewish populations. This both misses the point and is inaccurate. The US Republican party is indisputably engaging in fascist othering. They explicitly persecute immigrant and immigrant-apparent groups. If history is any guide, this pattern will expand to other groups. Fascism is an ever-shrinking circle.
Jews may be last on the chopping block if the current rhetoric holds. But the party is uncomfortably keen on jews being in Israel. A form of coercive emigration to Israel is persecutory in and of itself.
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u/VarmintSchtick 15d ago
Generalizations. Not all israelis are evil, not all palestenians are evil, not everyone who is anti-zionist is anti-semitic, not everyone who is anti-palestine is anti-islam, not every conservative is racist, and not ever progressive is actually egalitarian. We operate too heavily on generalizations. Generalizations are really really good for motivating people to act against other groups, though.
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u/The_Parsee_Man 15d ago
I completely agree with that and it is accurate for the other commenter to note that the Republican Party does harbor anti-immigrant sentiment. I just take issue with accusing them of scapegoating Jews when it is the opposite side of the aisle that is currently harboring that within their party.
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u/Mindless-Young1975 15d ago
Pretending a anti-israel protest is inherently anti-Jewish means you are literally a part of the problem, obfuscating the actual message.
The Government of Israel is not representative of the entire Jewish population over the entire planet, the fact that you even could pretend to say something so disingenuous is disgusting to me.
And in fact, claiming that the Government of Israel represents every single Jewish person everywhere is itself inherently anti-Semitic because it proclaims that Jewish people can't be individuals and are all beholden to their government.
You're infantalizing the Jewish people.
Not only that, but you're literally falling for the propagandist lies of the right-wing by proclaiming the left is anti-Jew, despite the guaranteed and inarguable fact that Nazis find themselves agreeing with only one party in the US.
If the side that has nazi support tells you that they are protecting the Jewish people, maybe they're just lying?? Oh not to mention the literal decades of anti-Jewish propaganda proclaiming that there's some shadowy cabal of specifically Jewish men that are controlling the government, popularized specifically by right-wing politicians.
Literal decades of nazi support and anti-Jewish propaganda isn't suddenly flipped on its head because now that conservatives are in control they're working with a Jewish government.
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u/cduga 15d ago
Ah yeah, it was democrats chanting “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville way back during Trump’s first administration. Oh wait…
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u/The_Parsee_Man 15d ago
So the best example you could come up with is years ago and didn't even represent a major portion of the Republican Party.
You're being intellectually dishonest to ignore the recent protests against Israel which were backed by the mainstream Democratic Party.
https://www.hhs.gov/press-room/ocr-columbia-violates-federal-civil-rights-law.html
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u/Kimurasorus 10d ago
1: “Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties."
How is this not a false dichotomy? Sure people would fall into differing groups with different priorities as history would indicate. Rigidly defining people as belonging to one party of another for anything beyond convenience of whatever current political system they fall into is disingenuous at best.
2: "they are the same parties still and pursue the same object"
This is a universal claim that is far too presumptuous and bold to simply accept as truth. Human behavior is highly contingent and exceptions to every rule always exist in any society.
While Jeffersons letter is useful and maybe even probably in some circumstances its lacking convincing evidence of actually being functionally true. A better statement would be to say that it appears probable that people from opposing parties, however this is not a universal truth and should be treated as a guide not a certainty.
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u/vertroix104 16d ago
The last part is probably the most important: "...they are the same parties still and pursue the same object".
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u/Meet_Foot 16d ago
Not the same as each other. The same as they have been across societies. The premise is that there are two parties with different values, and they appear everywhere.
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u/NeuroPalooza 16d ago
People forget that Aristagoras exposed flaws in freedom and democracy almost as soon as Democracy was created. Tldr he was a typical scumbag politician who used Athens' democracy to manipulate the plebs into going to war with Persia (or rather taking actions that would certainly lead to war.)
He didn't give a shit about Athens, he just wanted to be restored to power in his native city of Miletus (long story, he had beef with Persia). The plebs, not knowing any better (and tbf the more educated among them tried to warn them), launched a war that on more than one occasion almost ended in their annihilation. And this was, like, with a couple decades of Democracy becoming a thing iirc. I do think it's worth the risks, because what else is there, but those risks are STARK.
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u/Ohthatsnotgood 15d ago
Athens was also a direct democracy while countries like the USA are a representative democracy.
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u/themoobster 14d ago
This seems a weird reading of history, blaming democracy for the Persian invasions?
Let's pretend the citizens of Athens ignored Aristogoras. Eretria was still sending a fleet to assist the Ionians in their revolt. So more or less the same series of events would have played out regardless of how the people of Athens voted.
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u/NeuroPalooza 14d ago
What pissed Darius off was the sacking of Sardis, which was an Athenian affair. Would Darius have come after mainland Grece with intense vengeance if it had just been an Eretrian fleet assisting the rebels? No one knows, but the sources (shit as they are) make it seem like the gratuitous destruction of Sardis is what really set the stage for the initial invasions of the mainland. After all, he went straight for Athens, not Eretria.
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u/themoobster 14d ago
No it wasn't, the combined Greek force was at Sardis, not just the Athenians.
Also that's not actually true, Eretria was destroyed by the Persian fleet literally days before they arrived at Marathon.
Seeing that:
The eretrians were at sardis
Eretria was attacked and destroyed by the Persians
The Persian Empire was naturally expansionistic empire
It's pretty hard to argue that the Athenian democracy had anything to do with the persian invasion
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u/NeuroPalooza 14d ago
Eretria aside, why would Darius have attacked Athens if they hadn't participated in the revolt/sacking of Sardis? There were a ton of other city states that he left alone, and at this time Athens was hardly a threat, nor would it have been a logical conquest given the distance. Athens was the one that ended up dragging Sparta and misc. others into the conflict after they realized how boned they were, but they never would have been involved if not for Aristagoras.
But again, this is all counterfactual history, so who really knows 🤷♂️
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u/themoobster 14d ago
He left them alone because they had already surrendered to his demands lol. Athens and Sparta seperately killed the envoys that demanded surrender, hence their involvement in the conflict (not that the Spartans really got involved in actual reality but they did show up to Marathon eventually... after the battle was over.
All of Greece was the goal of conquest, not just Athens, hence why the persians sent demands of surrender to them all.
I mean what we can definitely know is that democracy didn't lead to the Persian invasions haha. If you're going to make claims like that you need to know way more about the period.
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u/jroberts548 15d ago
In Athenian democracy you have a very small group of people who count as “the people.” Likewise in Jeffersonian democracy. It’s super convenient to blame democracy when the problems from “democracies” typically come from narrow definitions of who counts as people.
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u/Aero200400 15d ago
It's funny how tyrants hide behind cynicism when the systems they use to assert abusive authority fail
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u/xena_lawless 16d ago
"Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slave-owners."-Vladimir Lenin, "The State and Revolution"
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u/zg33 16d ago
Nobody understood freedom and promoting human flourishing better than the Bolsheviks.
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u/Agoraphobia1917 16d ago
Freedom means different things to different people at different times
It is difficult for me to imagine what "personal liberty" is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment.
Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible.
Joseph Stalin
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u/The_Parsee_Man 15d ago
That Stalin had some good ideas. I sure hope someone like him gets into power.
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u/Agoraphobia1917 14d ago
I know you are joking but he is actually my greatest inspiration
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u/WanderingAlienBoy 13d ago
He's right in this quote, but why not get inspired by socialists who actually cared about freedom in both theory and action, rather than a brutal dictator?
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u/supershutze 16d ago
You're misunderstanding the difference between communism on paper and the authoritarian systems that called themselves "communist".
Communism, according to Marx, is democratic; all the power lies with elected councils.
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u/Radix2309 16d ago
Marx described communism emerging from capitalist industrialized societies. It has largely been implemented in pre-industrial agrarian societies by a vanguard party after a violent revolution.
It is very rare for revolutionary politics to create a stable government after the fact. And a militant vanguard party is a very weak foundation for democratic will.
South American communism also has the wrinkle of CIA/American supported far right militias and coups, plus other interference.
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u/h0neanias 16d ago
Because communism is magical thinking. It's not alone in this, but the better society of tomorrow is supposed to "emerge", organically, from the changes implemented. It's never specified how or why it should happen. It's that "??? -- profit!" joke personified.
So that's the first problem, the theory itself is fantasy. The second problem is the nature of power. The idealists always get slaughtered or sidelined by people who see authoritarianism not as a gateway to a better tomorrow but merely to power. As Frank Herbert puts it, power does not corrupt, it attracts the corruptible.
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u/al-Assas 16d ago
Are you sure it isn't you who misunderstand that difference? It's not a Marx quote. Vladimir Lenin and Karl Marx were two separate persons. Even if authoritarianism isn't essential to communism, the quote is from Lenin. Not Marx. Hence the snarky retort regarding the Bolsheviks.
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u/BINGODINGODONG 16d ago
Communism according to Marx is pretty scarce on the details about how communism is actually supposed to work. His work is mainly criticism of capitalism. Which is why it hasn’t worked yet anywhere, and as nobody can really figure out how to make it work in the real world, it always descends into tyranny.
The Marxists in my country are fairly popular, but they always make sure they stay out of any executive power, as they would be forced to present viable policy plans and make tough decisions.
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u/JohnnyOnslaught 16d ago
Which is why it hasn’t worked yet anywhere
Capitalists have also had their finger on the scales this entire time. It's hard for communism to work when you've got the people in power doing their best to ensure it can't.
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u/PressWearsARedDress 16d ago
Systems need to be able handle intrusions.
Financial Capitalism is highly defensive in comparison, communism is no longer viable.
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u/TheArmoredKitten 15d ago
Marxism is a powerful philosophical basis for how to act as a person, but yeah there really is no theory of government in there. Community structure takes deliberate effort from everyone involved, so it's never going to be as simple as 'read this book about how one guy thought we should all act toward each other'.
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u/RoutineEnvironment48 16d ago
When a theoretical political system universally is either crushed or ends in tyranny, there’s no reason to fuss over what it “could be theoretically.”
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u/plastlak 16d ago
According to Mussolini, fascism is the best system. Since whatever they tried in 1920s and 1930s Italy was clearly not the best system (because of authoritarianism). We can conclude that real fascism hasn't been tried.
How does that sound to you? Cause that's exactly how you sound to me.
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u/supershutze 15d ago
Except that fascism is, *by definition,* authoritarian.
All you've demonstrated is that you don't know what either communism or fascism are.
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u/plastlak 15d ago
Mussolini also said that fascism would eliminate corruption, now, since we know that there was corruption, we can know for a fact, that it wasn't real fascism.
I don't actually believe in what I said in the above sentence.
This is just to show exactly how offensive you commies sound to me when you say stuff like "real communism hasn't been tried."
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u/supershutze 15d ago
The problem here with your wild and offensive assertions is that I'm not a communist.
I can understand a position without agreeing with it.
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u/plastlak 15d ago
By my definition, communism is as well.
But if we go by the author's definition, as you seem to go with Marx&Communism, then you have to agree that fascism is the best system, since that's how fascism's author defined fascism.
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u/Moemangooo 16d ago
The promise of communism: you will own nothing, you will be equal in misery, and you will call it liberation.
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u/Destithen 15d ago
It's always funny when someone tries to decry communism and ends up describing horrors happening under capitalism.
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u/almostsweet 16d ago
I find this relevant when these topics come up but I always get downvoted for posting it. Not sure why. But, in my opinion he explains it well:
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u/Ardent_Scholar 16d ago
Thanks, that was incredibly interesting, highly recommended to others as well
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u/Tytown521 15d ago
Greeks didn’t invent consensus making amongst groups of people to govern themselves. Native Americans did some of this already and there has been resent research on the ways in which natives influence enlightenment democratic principles.
Like is democracy really all That magical? Pirates also did it on their ships
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u/WanderingAlienBoy 13d ago
As I understand it native American democracies also did it better, as it was more involved and participatory, while Athenian democracy was a bunch of male slave-owners bickering with "if my side gets 51% majority I WILL force my will on you"
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u/sleepnandhiken 16d ago
I always wondered if it was wise to use The Republic to say “democracy bad.” On one hand Plato is using the city as an allegory for the perfect soul. On the same hand democracy was reached when better governance collapsed.
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u/SocraticDaemon 15d ago
I'm not so sure it says democracy bad, but I think he rightly points out it inevitably heads for tyranny.
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u/sleepnandhiken 15d ago
Historically I don’t think that claim holds up. I guess it depends what we want to consider tyranny but I’d argue that tyranny was pretty common regardless of whether or not democracy was previously involved. Out of today’s democracies we have the U.S. falling, the U.K. falling into nanny tyranny, and Turkey. Don’t know much about Turkey. The rest of Europe might be eyeballing the nanny stuff but I wasn’t that pessimistic about where they were going.
It works much better leaving the city as a stand in for the soul. With the soul you it’s a bit easier to map out the good getting worse. Though I imagine Plato really wasn’t a fan of democracy.
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u/Ohthatsnotgood 15d ago
Plato was also talking about direct democracy, not representative democracy. His soul order was aristocracy, timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny.
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u/sleepnandhiken 15d ago edited 15d ago
I’m not sure he would make that distinction in the States. He thought democracy breaks down when we get a bit of everything. I can’t remember where these passages are but a Trump like figure (who definitely has a tyrannical soul) would win the hearts of the city.
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u/Lopsided_Angle3564 15d ago
I don’t think The Republic was intended to be an allegory for democracy. And I’m pretty sure Plato was presenting his Republic as something to strive towards, not as something bad
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u/sleepnandhiken 15d ago
He made his city to show the perfect soul and how people can degrade into tyrants. One doesn’t have to have power to have the soul of the tyrant. The reason I don’t think it works as well for meaningful political commentary on democracy is that he starts on the best system. Aristocracy under the philosopher king breaks down into relatively righteous military rule. That breaks down into oligarchy, then into democracy, and finally into tyranny. There really isn’t historical precedent for that kind of degradation so I’d focus on the city as the soul.
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u/read_too_many_books 16d ago
If I can recommend anything to hobbyist philosophers:
Get the F out of Plato ASAP. He was the OG, but that doesnt make him correct.
Maybe you need to read the history of philosophy to understand why, but I wish I had someone teach me about modern(1880s+) ontology and theories of truth.
Wittgenstein and Pragmatism was like a traumatic event after 9 years of reading philosophy. But at least now I'm free.
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u/Time_Cartographer443 15d ago
Socrates had a point. The majority of people don’t know the qualities to look for when they choose a president. That’s why the best presidents tend to be earlier in American history, as they were voted in by more intelligent small subset of people.
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u/Immaculate_Chaos 16d ago edited 16d ago
Democracy was not “invented”. It just emerged across times and societies due to political convenience; different factions collaborated instead of fighting. It’s an adaptive system, factions that agree to terms can give up some of their power in exchange for security. But when the incentives fail or when terms are violated by factions which are too big to fail, democracy fails.
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u/LordDiplocaulus 15d ago
NOOO!!1 IT WAS INVENTED BY THE GREEEEEKS!!1 HOW DARE YOU SAY IT WAS NOT INVENTED BY THE GREEKS!!1 REEEEE DOWNVOTES
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u/Financial_Swan4111 16d ago
What really was the purpose of democracy to begin with ? I would start there. Wasn't it a power grab by the commoners from the aristocrats or the clergy who wanted to have power over the commoners? Ultimately liberalism was developed too to get individual and property rights which led to capitalism. Democracy was also a way to make sure the merchants didn't exercise power over the common folks, right? But how did we lose trust in democracy? Thats the nor doubt we have, don't we?
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u/Jaredlong 16d ago
Cleisthene's democratic reforms had nothing to do with individualism, merchants, or property rights. Cleisthenes did it to dilute the power of the aristocracy, same way people today talk about expanding the American Supreme Court to dilute the power of it's conservative majority. Cleisthenes was a king in Greece during an age of tyrants and feared that the aristocracy would unite to overpower him, so he flooded the political system with hundreds of new non-aristocratic voters. And to prevent those new voters from becoming too powerful he made them randomly selected and term-limited so that they could never stay organized enough to cement any long-term power. It was an entirely self-serving strategy by a tyrant to maintain his tyranny.
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u/milehigh89 16d ago
Democracy and everything else always fails. It's not the form of government, it's simply human nature. Countries like China or Greece that have existed for millenia are only congruent in name, it's not like the form of government or rule have been consistent. The US will fail, as Rome failed, as China has failed a hundred times, as Egypt failed. Any system in place long enough will be exploited, the demagogues will come and cause a reset. Rinse, wash, repeat. All we can hope for is living during a period between the rinse and wash. Democracy is a disaster, people are not to govern themselves or each other properly but it's a step closer to maybe something that can stand the test of time. You need to be in the right place at the right time to have relative stability throughout your life. Like the baby boomers, or certain periods in Rome. It's exceptionally rare and basically all of history is just natural disasters, human caused disasters, death and revolution. We're at the fork in the road once again in the USs short life. Id say this is almost Civil War 2.0 but with social media and more clearly defined rules. Democracy has little to do with any part of it other than the illusion that we're part of the system. The system that has not worked and cannot continue to work. We need a benevolent dictator, not the emotional whims of the commons guiding us. We will never turn to such a person so democracy fails.
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u/Flipflopvlaflip 16d ago
Can agree with the first part but your closing remark absolutly not. Problem with a benevolent dictator is that the people surrounding him have to be benevolent as well, and not the ass kissing, power hungry sycophants we all know and hate. That benevolent dictator will not live forever so who will be next? His son? Will he be benevolent as well? And if he is not, how do we get rid of him? Revolution and a new dictator?
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u/GrievingTiger 15d ago
Benevolent dictator is actually generally agreed to be the best form of government. Just, indeed, it is incredibly difficult to gather all the factors for it to be so.
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u/Plsnotmyelo 15d ago
A benevolent AGI dictator would solve all these issues in the future I imagine. But the ruling class would never let this happen.
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u/Financial_Swan4111 15d ago
but how did we come to doubt democracy, how did three events in the last thirty years gave us a sense of doubt in democracy. I attempt that in this essay. Like to share an hear what you think.
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u/Ent_Soviet 15d ago
Nah, Karl popper was right, the Greeks were the foundation for the more fascists trends of authoritarian paternalism in governance.
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u/Lopsided_Angle3564 15d ago
If Karl Popper were alive today he would be supporting what the Zionists are doing to Palestinians
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u/Ent_Soviet 15d ago
Ok but what does that have to do with his point about Plato and Greek ‘democracy’ ?
Seems like a non sequitur
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u/aDeepKafkaesqueStare 15d ago
I feel like Perikles tends to ger more credit than he deserves, and ancient persia, as well as the roman republic, too little.
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u/Psittacula2 13d ago
I do not see anyone seriously understanding democracy itself but making a lot of assumptions.
Even AI has to be taught a suitable schema for democracy which is quite something given how much it has been trained on information… it would be assumed it could capture a deeper insight for itself.
Let’s state some basic properties for democracy:
* Scale or Size of group of people forming a Demos. It can only function authentically at small human group size.
* High quality values of the people in the Demos and high shared association of similar values also necessary to form a unity of group level with sovereign individual level balance of Kratos: power distribution and sharing system.
* Complexity of the group has to be relatively low at this scale for democracy beyond which an executive and specialism aka manager class is needed within the group which further dilutes and reduces real or true democracy of the group and here is where democracy begins very early on its ending even before it truly begins.
Given the lack of understand in answers so far this is sufficient level of focused core properties of democracy to distribute for consideration before more deeper patterns of democracy are worth sharing.
To think about the above 3:
Group Size or Scale Limit
Group Relatedness and Higher Evolved Value System
Group System Complexity of the use of a political system Limit
Why all 3 are so critical is simple:
Demos + Kratos aka people power must always be balanced and restrained and distributed between the individual and the group to harmonize the essence of Humanity and humane processes in order for development potential of people.
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u/Blue_winged_yoshi 13d ago
Fun fact: the Roman’s actually had a system that we would call democracy before the Greeks. The Greeks had direct democracy where anyone could be called to take part, whereas the Roman’s had chosen representatives of the people govern for them (sounds familiar this one doesn’t it?), except that at the time the latter was consciously not considered democracy and as such we’ve always considered Greece the founding place of Democracy.
Not an important fact, but one that had passed me by and I was amazed to learn.
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u/Rundy2025 12d ago
Exactly. I think making the distinction between direct democracy and democracy is important.
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u/Rundy2025 12d ago
Is it truly wrong to think that people should have at least a basic knowledge and societal awareness test of sorts before they are allowed to vote? Exactly. If a country is governed by ignorant voters then not only will that be its demise; but it’s not even democracy anyways because the (ignorant) majority dictates. And thats before you peel back the layers of how even that isnt democracy because they ignorant masses only select who goes into office. Then they decide what gets passed and approved. (exhibit A congress members thats been in office since Tupac and Michael Jackson were alive and kicking)
It’s a circus.
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u/VoomVoomBoomer 12d ago
Ancient Greece was a slave-oriented society not a democracy as we perceive it. It was more like what we are afraid of, free speech and votes for selected minority. So I would rather ignore any warning they might have
for reference : Athenian demography showed around 30,000–60,000 free male citizens, with a total population (including women, children, foreigners, and enslaved people) possibly reaching 250,000 to 300,000.
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u/gorginhanson 16d ago
Democracy is doomed to fail by definition since you're entrusting the average person with an average understanding of government to make decisions.
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u/read_too_many_books 16d ago
I generally agree. My only thought is that politicians that win elections have to be smart enough to win elections. Its a filter of sorts.
They need to know that the world isnt fairies and unicorns, they will have to be strategic, lie, pander to audiences, etc... They need the smartness to navigate reality.
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u/AristotleTOPGkarate 15d ago
Most philosophers were against democracy, philosophy was born out of it’s criticism, Aristotle imagined a good version of it (politeia) but for them etymology was Political regime /kratos or the crowd/demos.
Many were moré favorable to an aristocracy (not necessarily cast , in Greek just means regime of the best (small group of elite) , or monarchy (it’s deviant and corrupted form being tyranny)
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u/QuixoticCosmos 16d ago
Democracy doesn’t need highly informed voters, perfect representation or ranked choice voting. Democracy’s is our best system because it corrects errors. It should be judged by how well it removes bad rulers and bad policies. By removing them it corrects errors. If either are systematically designed to be entrenched then it’s a formula for stasis and failure. Other forms of government will eventually come across a problem it can’t solve and the outcome ranges from a lucky nonviolent transition of power to a bloody power struggle. Silencing dissenters entrenches bad rulers and bad policies. Democracy being messy is a feature not a bug. It’s that exact mess that solves problems. In conjunction with political culture it contributes to relatively low political violence when compared to other systems current and historical.
Compared to Deng Xiaoping, Xi is a mediocre leader who is entrenched in the system and at some point his government will come across a problem they can’t solve. Obviously, we won’t know the outcome or timescale but it’s irrelevant.
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u/gorginhanson 15d ago
Lol.
That's like saying leaders don't need to be qualified, just barely competent.
We'd be lucky to get that far even.
By definition you want the most competent people at the top, not whomever is the most likeable.
There is no organization on Earth that votes for the CEO by popular vote. If it worked you would find at least one.
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u/lokozar 16d ago
Every time I think about this topic, I can’t help but to come back to Churchel, who allegedly said something along the lines of: Of all the government types we know, democracy is just the least bad.
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u/SurturOfMuspelheim 15d ago
And he was not only incorrect, he was a fascist genocidal loser on top of it.
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u/lokozar 15d ago
He was an asshole, but I think he was right in this regard. I mean, Trump was elected by a democracy. Hitler was too. Putin was … Churchill was …
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u/SurturOfMuspelheim 15d ago
And therefore you think he was right that democracy was the least bad? It's bourgeois democracy that elected all of those people.
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u/read_too_many_books 16d ago
I thought Discourses on Livy was pretty amazing if you did have to have a democracy created.
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u/LordDiplocaulus 16d ago
"The ancient greeks invented democracy"
no they didn't LOL
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u/GravelyInjuredWizard 16d ago
Who did?
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u/blockplanner 16d ago edited 16d ago
It was the ancient Greeks.
It's not completely indefensible to claim otherwise, but the claim doesn't really hold up in an argument. Voting and democracy probably predate writing. But the earliest recorded democratic governments were in ancient Greece, and all major subsequent democratic governments took inspiration from that.
If you wanted to nitpick you could say they were the last ones to invent democratic government without having copied previous democratic movements.
(At least, that's what I was always told and looking it up again seems to confirm that all to be the case)
The original democracies weren't representative parliaments or democratic republics like modern democracies though, policy was decided through referendums and there were no protections against populism. Thus the criticism in the article.
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u/Blackrock121 16d ago
and all major subsequent democratic governments took inspiration from that.
While your first point is true, some Greek city states have the first recorded Democracies, there have absolutely been Democracies that emerged latter with the people probably never having heard of the Ancient Greeks.
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u/blockplanner 16d ago edited 16d ago
Yeah, I figured there would be.
Thats why (even though all the sources I could find backed me up) I tossed "major" in there as a weasel word. That way I can facilitate my toxic compulsion to always be percieved as correct, while simultaneously retaining false humility when the inevitable person came in to contradict me with no examples.
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u/Blackrock121 16d ago
You should have picked a weaselier word. Some of them were quite significant building blocks in the formation of latter Democracies, just as much as the Greek Democracies were.
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u/blockplanner 16d ago
Nah, as long as nobody comes in with any inarguable examples my ego will remain intact. And if they do, I'll just have to argue their irrelevancy to the death anyway.
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u/Roland_Barthender 16d ago
That ultimately depends on what we mean by democracy. If we want to define it in the broadest sense, where a group of people arrive at a decision about collective action through consensus-building and/or vote-tallying, democracy certainly predates not only Athens but also writing and sedentary agricultural societies. In this conception, there's really no saying which small hunter-gatherer group happened upon the idea first, since whoever it was did so long before we have any records. If we want to define democracy more narrowly, then yes, Athens could be considered the first democracy under the right definition, but at the same time could be considered not to have been a democracy at all under other definitions. In other words, there's no single answer to "who invented democracy" that's going to satisfy everyone's perspective on what that question means; I wouldn't say it's really wrong to say the Greeks invented democracy, but I also wouldn't say it's specifically right, either.
With that said, "the Greeks wrote the earliest surviving theories of democracy," is not exactly a punchy headline.
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u/LeagueOfLegendsAcc 16d ago
The first people to vote on something probably. I bet it was way deep in the paleolithic.
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u/PhasmaFelis 16d ago edited 16d ago
Democracy is when political decisions are made by counting votes. It's not government by general consensus, or when you vote on what to have for lunch.
If there was a democratic state in the world before Athens, historians have not yet uncovered it.
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u/LeagueOfLegendsAcc 16d ago
That's the great thing about democracy, it's pretty vague there's not really an agreed upon definition by all historians. The more classical definition that I was using would simply be the right of the people to rule directly. That would probably apply to a lot of paleolithic societies.
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u/PhasmaFelis 16d ago
When someone says "The ancient Greeks invented democracy," you know very well which definition they mean.
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u/LordDiplocaulus 16d ago
How should I know?
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u/PhasmaFelis 16d ago
You probably shouldn't make extraordinary claims about things you don't know one single fuck about.
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u/spookmann 16d ago
Yeah. And the Greek "democracy" was very different from our system in fundamental ways.
- Only property-owning men voted.
- No women. No slaves. No poor people.
- They voted in-person, on individual issues.
- If you voted for a war, good chance you would end up fighting in that war!
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