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Our Democracy is a Delusion on the Verge of Collapsing

Meanwhile, our democratically elected representatives are holding on to the fuse in one hand and a box of matches in the other.

Rui Alves
10 min readJul 14, 2022
Photo by Tyler Merbler | Public domain

Please bear with me as I say this, but you have been sold a lie regarding democracy.

To make matters worse, this isn’t only about American politics. The United States government serves merely as an example of how one of the world’s most revered political systems isn’t as flawless as we were lead to believe.

Now that I’ve got that out of the way, let’s look at the reasons for such a blunt assertion.

Democracy: The ultimate fallacy

Democracy is intended to be a system of government in which all voting citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives. However, “intent” amounts to nothing more than the ultimate political utopia.

Yet “democracy” somehow flourished for millennia despite being rejected by some of the greatest thinkers.

From Aristotle to Plato, from Rousseau to Nietzsche, some of humanity’s greatest thinkers have discredited democracy thus exposing it as the ultimate fallacy.

As citizens, we have been manipulated to believe that we are governed by the best political system; however, in reality, we are governed by the least bad of the lot.

There is no such thing as true democracy; it was a construct devised by Greek philosophers. Rousseau explains that for a country to host such a system, it must be: geographically small so that everyone can meet and debate; peaceful and homogeneous so that no major problems arise to stimulate thorny discussions between different groups; and finally, there must be equal access to wealth so that no one is distinguished according to their possessions.

Athenian democracy dates back to 507 B.C., when Cleisthenes first introduced a system called demokratia, which translates to something like “ruled by the people.” Here lie the roots of the democratic fallacy — “people” should be read as “citizens” — Athenian citizenship was only granted to men whose parents had also been citizens. Women had limited rights even if they…

Rui Alves
Rui Alves

Written by Rui Alves

Portugal native community-builder with an MA in Languages & Cultures. Linguist, published author, musician, international book awards judge and digital ronin.

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