[PittleyDunkin]

> If it were true wouldn't all democratic societies be in danger.

Democracy is more or less in a permanent state of crisis. This has been discussed thoroughly since the time of Athens, and certainly Rome. The late days of the republic were characterized by squabbling over the specifics of who got to lobby voters, how they were allowed to, and where they were allowed to. For instance they have laws on the books dictating the physical structure of the buildings that people voted in to ensure that the rich couldn't basically station people in the halls leading to the ballots to purchase votes or physically intimidate voters. This is also reflected in the sudden populist turns of eg the Gracchi brothers and Caesar himself.

It's also true of the American republic. Self-conception of us as an egalitarian democracy is still around at best a century old, and more accurately around sixty years old. And we remain extremely far from being an obviously healthy democracy. Of course, the state has vacillated between actions you could argue are wise and those that are clearly not, before and after these divides.

I really would be very cautious at viewing democracies as reflecting of "wisdom". We often can (and often do) come to consensus that is extremely ill-advised from the perspective of the needs of the populace. Democracy is more or less permanently perched on the tension between the will and needs of the constituents which are often at blatant odds with each other. There's a reason why the Philosopher King has held such a cultural weight through the millennia. At best democracy is a best-faith effort to approximate wisdom through consensus—sometimes with better faith than other times.

[phyzix5761]

Polybius's Anacyclosis

[PittleyDunkin]

Yup. I can't imagine that holds up today as a structural theory but the same conversation is there.

[psychoslave]

> Democracy is more or less in a permanent state of crisis.

Maybe we should define democracy and state of crisis before reaching to any conclusion.

We can just as well consider human history as a graph of political crisis.

As for democracy, if we mean a system were everyone in the crowd is equal citizen and the people officially rules itself directly, there is probably no single State in the world that fits the definition.

Sociopaths have an edge to rule society as they are inclined to impose their agenda through relentless use of all the means they can think of while most people will refrain themselves from most crual actions for ethical concerns.

And of course sociopaths are going to pretend they became and remain king thanks to the will of some mighty divinity, their demiurgic actions, and their exceptional wisdom.

The appealing point for democracy is that those who have to follow the law are those who makes the law, do a feedback loop can tweak the way the society organize along the way without possibility to ignore the actual consequences of these decisions.