[somenameforme]

Imagine democracy playing out in literally any measurable field. Think about society getting to vote on who should be on a basketball team, but without any real knowledge of the candidates' abilities beyond what they said and advertised about themselves. And then we put the winners of the vote on a team. They'd get face-stomped by a D-tier NBA team pretty much always.

Democracy isn't about maximizing outcomes, because maximizing outcomes entails the possibility of minimizing outcomes. Marcus Aurelius was perhaps one of the best rulers in all of history. His son, Commodus - raised by him from birth, was certainly one of the worst rulers in all of history. Minority rule systems oscillate between extremes of the best of times and the worst of times. Democracy is always just kind of meh, never particularly great, never particularly awful.

But it creates a stable system because while it's meh in the present, you can always envision that things will be totally different in 4 years. Of course they won't be, but there's this weird bug in our psychology that we can't help but remain optimistic, even though in reality candidate after candidate it always feels like 'well it can't get any worse than this at least' and then the next guy is like 'hold my beer.'