25 August

Democracy is not about electing people. Everywhere mass elections have been introduced, democracy is in free fall. It turns the ordinary running of basic things into an endless popularity contest, where the things that need doing become just fodder for status games between the elected. But everything always needs to be led, in some way. People don’t spontaneously self-organise civilisation. One of the reasons Kings and churches are the dominant ways of doing that in history is that both take away the daily battle for who’s top of the tree, and place it in a mechanism outside daily life (succession, and God, respectively).