29 October

Humans always have hierarchies, because humans value things, and those values create hierarchies - some things are better than other things. I think there’s a misunderstanding of democracy as being ‘rule by the people’, together with ‘freedom of speech’ for those people. Neither of those is true, democracy is as hierarchical as the systems it says aren’t. All the people do is elect the hierarchy, to represent them. So some input, but very tiny. And this is how it should be, because if you want wisdom and expertise to guide your society, you need hierarchies of wisdom and expertise. Populism promises people a way to avoid all that. Populism is a dangerous liar. Most of what runs democracies is bureaucracies, the accumulated wisdom of generations. The people who encourage you to hate bureaucracies just want to replace those generations of wisdom with their own hierarchy of personal whim. Like Trump.