Democracy contains an unfortunate catch which needs to be addressed if we are to move forward with it. You see, if democracy simply moves in the direction of popular opinion, then all one must do in order to crumble the system is to turn popular opinion against the system itself. In this way, Democracy is fundamentally vulnerable and prone toward collapse. So then the question is, if democracy has this fatal flaw, how did it get to be so common and widespread in the modern world?

This is also simple to answer. The simple fact is, that for the past couple hundred years, democracy has been popular. It has been the latest trend that all the cool kids are doing. America led this trend. In fact, America started the trend. America declared democracy, said F-you to the biggest empire on Earth at the time, wrote a declaration espousing Egalitarianism, and then defeated said empire in a massively embarrassing and humiliating way. America won really hard, and then got to write the world narrative for the next couple centuries. It is the same as if a weird little autistic nerd beats up the most popular star football player and suddenly he is seen as a cool badass and everyone wants to be his friend and copy him. The secret here is, human beings naturally mimic those whom they perceive to be successful. This is not an incredibly mysterious thing. It makes sense from an evolutionary point of view that organisms would have a natural instinct to copy the most successful member of their group. After all, if they’re successful, then they must be doing something right.

So when public opinion is in favor of democracy, it does fine. It’s stable and strong and doesn’t need too much protection. But when public opinion turns against democracy, then it is very quickly doomed to fail.

Imagine, for instance, that we had a new trend in public opinion that said that democracy was out of fashion and that some other form of government, say totalitarianism, was the new and trendy thing that all the cool kids were doing. Then, in the next election, a candidate who supports this new trend gets elected because the majority public opinion is on his side. One can imagine where this is going. Said candidate, if he is true to his word, would set about dismantling democracy, and instituting totalitarianism as per the prescription of the fancy new anti-democratic trend. Thus democracy would very quickly crumble.

In reality, a democratic system is like a large heavy box being held up by four people (one on each corner). If one of the people decides to let go of the box, then the other three must exert more effort to compensate. If two of the people (half the population) let go of the box, then it falls to the ground and becomes unmovable. If three of the people (over half of the population) let go of the box, then the last person is left completely powerless to move the heavy box as it sits on the ground and gathers dust. The point is, a democratic system cannot allow over half of its population to lose faith in democracy or turn against it ideologically. If this happens, it becomes a self-fulfilling downward spiral because the less people believe in the democratic system, the less effective it will be, and the less effective it is, the less people will believe in it. In this way, Democracy is like Tinkerbell. It only exists and has power when you believe in it really hard.

In fact, any and all political systems are like this. The social contract theory, the idea that a leader only rules because of the consent of the governed, is simply another expression of this. That is, take the most authoritarian absolute monarch possible, and consider what would happen if nobody in his society believed that he had the right to rule. Who would enforce his commands? Normally, such a leader would use the military and police to impose force on anyone who challenges his authority. But if the people of the military and police believe him to be unjustified, and thus refuse to follow his commands, then how will he impose his will onto the population? This is why leaders throughout history have historically claimed to either be gods themselves, or to be appointed by the divine. It is because there necessarily must be an aspect of belief underneath all types of systems of government. Using religion, a system that is already entirely based on belief, is a good way to generate this belief. This essentially makes the government into a religion. In fact, anyone who follows a religion faithfully should despise those who use their religion for such purposes. Leaders who claim divine right are like parasites to religions. Yet, democracy is no less constrained by these same underlying mechanisms than any authoritarian monarchy. Democracy requires just as much faith as monarchy. However, while monarchy requires widespread faith in the right of the monarch to rule, democracy requires widespread faith in the justification of the system itself, not any particular person.

One may suggest that democracy could be based on reason alone, rather than belief. But the problem with this is that, much to the discontent of philosophers and the champions of reason (of which I am sadly one myself) reason leads many people to very different conclusions. This should be easily evident from the fact that philosophers spend all of their time arguing with each other, and after a few thousand years of arguing, there is still very little consensus. In fact it seems that many people have completely different senses of reason. One person may follow their reasoning toward one conclusion, and another may follow their reason toward another completely different  conclusion. This type of process can be extremely useful for discovering things and developing effective methods of doing things. Don’t get me wrong, I love reason, and I will continue to promote it as a general value and aspiration. But as a basis for a system, it is chaotic, unstable, and does not lend itself well to governance at all.

So what democracy requires is, paradoxically, a certain control of public opinion, at least enough to keep it in favor of democracy. Democracy necessarily relies on the maintenance of positive public opinion toward itself. This is how one must perform maintenance on a democratic system, just like one must perform maintenance on a car, or a house, or any other organized construct. This is perhaps uncomfortable to many modern people, however, because we have not needed to do much of this maintenance until recently. For the past couple centuries, we’ve been riding the trend of democracy, and we haven’t had to worry that much about it. The little amount of maintenance we had to do in this time was easy, because we were riding with the current. But tides and times change, as do all things. We became complacent and lazy in the maintenance of our system, and thus it began to degrade, broken down by the revilers of democracy who are present in every age. We allowed their rhetoric to seep into the Zeitgeist like a putrid poison and spread throughout the system while we ignored the problem and said things like “It’ll be fine. The system always fixes itself eventually.”

This was a fallacy, a mere excuse for our own laziness and sloth. Now we can see by our crumbling system’s spasms of death that the system does not fix itself, it must be maintained. This maintenance must come in the form of a culture and ideology which not only exalts and venerates Democracy, but takes it as a dogmatic axiom. We may have open discussion about many things, but there must be some set of core of values which are untouchable, which are unquestionable because we know that to question them is necessarily to invite harm upon our civilization.

Democracy must be one of these core values, because to question it is to destroy it. If democracy is unpopular, then it will be replaced with something else, and the current menu of political systems is very sparse and overwhelmingly includes mostly various types of authoritarianism. Perhaps this is appealing to those who were raised in non-western cultures that espouse authoritarianism as a core value. But, if you are like me and were raised in a western culture that venerates Freedom as a fundamental good, and Tyranny as a fundamental evil, then democracy is realistically your only option. Yet I think it is an option to be proud of.