A common defense of democracy is that while it does not guarantee the establishment of good government, it ensures the removal of a bad one.

However, it seems to me that in reality government is anti fragile, and not fragile as is often claimed. That is to say, one good king covers the reign of many bad successors or predecessors. And a bad king will not lead to the ruin of his land if a good king has existed in recent memory.

China is one such example. One great king, Deng Xiaoping, has shone a light on the 100 year history of the PRC, despite his much weaker counterparts.

The other big lie is that democracy can remove a bad government. In reality, a long string of bad government is likely to reduce the population to slavery (in their lack of virtues if not their formal lack of freedom), enthrall them with palliative bullshit, divide them with culture war spectacle, drain the vitality out of any political association capable of ambition, and entrench itself in all the places that can't be replaced by mere election. Case in point: our own time. Democracy was rightfully a bad word for most of history and for most of the wise.

Fragile and antifragile as applied to government is a great frame. I suspect you are correct. Most technology is antifragile in the sense that the failures don't matter but the successes do. The engine itself is fragile, but the process of creating it is antifragile. If the engineer can get it running even once, it proves the whole thing and quite possibly pays for all. The gains from getting it right are immense, and the failures mostly just waste bounded time and capital.

A good king doesn't just do great work in his own time, but sets the tone and example for subsequent kings, and builds up capital of immense value that would take a long time to decay down under bad management. So the overwhelming imperative is to focus on how to build/train/summon a good one. Never mind the irrelevent ghetto of bad government: how does good government work and how can we build one? Study the thing you wish to create.

Positive virtue vs negative virtue is another way of looking at this. The negative virtue worldview sees evil and sin as the defining condition and wishes to escape them by prevention and non-action. The vicious version is a drive against life itself because non-life does not sin, and life does. This corresponds to liberal theories of government where the goal is to thwart or not do bad government, and good government is pathologized as doing too much, too dangerously. The positive virtue worldview sees success and virtue as the defining condition, which is difficult to reach but makes everything else irrelevant. To be free, healthy, and upright is the target of striving, and if we can produce even a few such specimens of living truth, we win.

>>1433

Agree with the above.

Worth noting that Western regimes are not democracies in any case, but oligarchies that rule through an administrative apparatus. "Democracy" serves in them as a political formula, in Gaetano Mosca's sense, like divine right in older regimes.

The United States most approximated a representative democracy from 1829 to 1861, and ever less so thereafter.

>>1437
>Western regimes are not democracies in any case, but oligarchies that rule through an administrative apparatus

There are two kinds of democracy that need to be refuted: most urgently of course this lie that western regimes are or even are supposed to be democratic. Lies everywhere must be destroyed, and you are correct that we live under administrative oligarchy legitimized by lies. (I think even an honest administrative oligarchy would be preferable. Committing to the truth in one area makes corruption less viable in another, and coordination easier everywhere.)

But democracy as such is an absurdity, a utopian dream, and undesirable. It's not actually true that people don't need leadership, that leadership comes from the collective will, or that giving people political rights makes them more virtuous, that a healthy democracy can remove bad regimes, or any of the other stuff people say about democracy.

I will say that there are some virtues that democracy often claims as its own, which in practice seem orthogonal: having a highly capable and politically virtuous population that can freely self govern and take matters into their own hands is great. Having high quality crowdsourcing mechanisms to solicit feedback from a broad set of people is great. Having a government that enjoys the enthusiastic support of its subjects is great. Having a government that cares to develop its subjects towards their best life with their participation and consent is great. I just don't think any of these have much to do with democracy. I don't think they either cause or are caused by democracy. Rather they are just symptoms and goals of good government.