really—empirically, life just gets so much worse without democratic
representation, in almost every way.^30 And it’s not because democracy is so
great. It’s more that a functioning democracy fucks things up less often and
less severely than any other form of government. Or, as Churchill famously
once said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except all the
others.”
The whole reason the world became civilized and everyone stopped
slaughtering one another because of their funny hats is because modern social
institutions effectively mitigated the destructive forces of hope. Democracy is
one of the few religions that manages to allow other religions to live
harmoniously alongside it and within it. But when those social institutions are
corrupted by the constant need to please people’s Feeling Brains, when people
become distrustful and lose faith in the democratic system’s ability to self-
correct, then it’s back to the shit show of religious warfare.^31 And with the
ever-advancing march of technological innovations, each cycle of religious
war potentially wreaks more destruction and devastates more human life.^32
Plato believed societies were cyclical, bouncing back and forth between
freedom and tyranny, relative equality and great inequality. It’s pretty clear
after the past twenty-five hundred years that this isn’t exactly true. But there
are patterns of political conflict throughout history, and you do see the same
religious themes pop up again and again—the radical hierarchy of master
morality versus the radical equality of slave morality, the emergence of
tyrannical leaders versus the diffuse power of democratic institutions, the
struggle of adult virtues against childish extremism. While the “isms” have
changed throughout the centuries, the same hope-driven human impulses have
been behind each movement. And while each subsequent religion believes it
is the ultimate, capital T “Truth” to unite humanity under a single, harmonious
banner, so far, each of them has only proven to be partial and incomplete.