“We are going through a very strange time. You know you are living in it but you don't know what is going to happen at the end.”
—Mick Jagger, apparently.
Let’s consider the idea that democracies are inherently doomed. It is a view of long pedigree. Homer, Aristotle writes, “says that ‘it is not good to have a rule of many,’” although he qualifies this: “whether '[Homer] means by this corporate rule, or the rule of many individuals, is uncertain.”
I probably shouldn’t quibble with Aristotle about what Homer meant. I assume his study of Homer was more thorough than mine. But I just looked it up, out of curiosity, and I don’t see how you can read it in context and be uncertain:
we cannot all be kings; it is not well that there should be many masters; one man must be supreme- one king to whom the son of scheming Saturn has given the sceptre of sovereignty over you all." That’s not my point, however. My point is that people have been suspicious of democracy since the first oral epics.
