Excerpt from my book “One World! – Why the rise and fall of Great Powers musst come to an end” published in German but not yet available in English.
Whereas democracies assume that everyone is fallible, in totalitarian regimes the fundamental assumption is that the ruling party or the supreme leader is always right. Harari
What defines a system as ‘democratic’ is only that its centre doesn’t have unlimited authority and that the system possesses robust mechanisms to correct the centre’s mistakes. Harari
The sciences of nature are fundamentally accessible to all humans. Knowledge is not inherited; it must be acquired through individual effort. In this regard, science and enlightenment were inherently democratic from the beginning. However, democracy as a political form of governance does not necessarily arise from the demands of enlightenment. If knowledge and skills are to replace privileges, we may well argue that the leadership of the state should be in no other hands than those of educated experts. Given this premise, it is by no means surprising that leading figures of the European Enlightenment, such as Montesquieu, Locke, Voltaire, Hume, Rousseau, or Kant, widely differed as to their opinions on this matter. For instance Rousseau: his “volonté générale” was never more than an intellectual construct, only to be found in the real world when the masses are incited by demagogues. And let’s not forget: more than two thousand years earlier, none other than Plato had expressed the opinion that the governance of a state should be in the hands of the knowledgeable — the philosophers as he called them. In doing so, he was inspired by Sparta, a military dictatorship.
Democracy – a reversibel Progress weiterlesen
