US President-elect Donald Trump (Image: Private Media/Zennie) They say democracy tends to tend towards tyranny after a while. Socrates wasn’t a big fan of it, and this was in the days when everyone (bar women and slaves, natch) could vote on every decision being made. Of course, the smaller city-states were a lot easier to run back then when they housed only a couple hundred thousand people, only 30% of them eligible to cast a ballot and only 6,000 or so bothering to turn up on the Pnyx to do so.
Socrates didn’t like democracy because there were too many idiots in the mix and thought they shouldn’t have equal say. Aside from the idiot factor, there was also the problem of how slow and cumbersome the process became as the city-state grew larger. By the time everyone had cast their vote about how to defend themselves against an enemy whose soldiers just did what they were told, Athens was crushed under the heel of the Spartan sandal.
Not that military occupation is a bed of roses either. Eventually the natives get uppity and start throwing stones. Then a bigger and better-organised bunch (usually led by an Alexander-the-Great type) sticks their flag in your mountain and a sword through your chest and pretty soon you’ve got a monarch.
A snottily superior plea for tolerance Read More This works for a while (longer if you can convince people that God had something to do with it) because the king’s army protects you from the armies of other kings. But when things settle d.