11 October

Are we really democratic in our hearts? I talk to people about this a lot. I think nearly everybody prefers living in a democracy, but I’m much less sure it’s well understood what that actually means. My experience is that our ideas about how democracies work are usually adult fairy tales, with almost no connection with reality. We don’t learn this stuff. Interestingly, it’s very common to like democracies, but at the same time to be convinced that most of the people in them are stupid. Usually when they do something like elect Trump or refuse to believe in climate change. Here’s an eye-opening summary though of how ‘the herd’ is way smarter than you or me, if it’s allowed to operate in certain ways. Those ways funnily enough bear a striking resemblance to how democracies were first created. (I also love pictures of crowds, like this one, because look at the faces. Crowds are made up of individuals, each doing their own thing, for their own reasons. People who say individuals and groups are separate things miss this I think.)