Miss

My opinion on the Athenian Democracy I try hard to think about it, to consider all positive and negative aspects of it. Today we are raised believing that democracy is the best possible political system. But I can’t get myself to like it. Just thinking about it makes me very uncomfortable, I can’t imagine the assemblies (even the one with just 500 persons attending) anything else then really messy. The end effect is that there are a few influential individuals that are very charismatic and they are the ones that decide. Nevertheless, at least they have to get approved by the crowd. If you think about it, there hasn’t changed much 2500 years later. People get the impression that they are deciding, but they were in the past as well as we are nowadays ruled by a few key (opinion-making) persons, not always the smartest, but the most charismatic and influential with the best connections. In some cases once they get to the top, they rule over the land for just as long as monarchs did. Of course, there are some positive aspects of democracy such as limited power, the fear of committing a crime so obvious that the folk could vote them down and a possibility to be trialed. I think the problem of democracy (in fact, of any other political regime) is that it would only perfectly work if human kind was ideal. But that isn’t the case, people are selfish and they can’t handle power. Moreover, most of the people don’t care much for politics, so they are not very well informed and thus can be easily manipulated. Even politicians, who may have good intentions at the beginning, become often tired of it when they realize it is much easier to make things work for themselves rather than the state. All in one, I don’t think that democracy is a perfect system. Certainly, it got some limits. My Father always says that democracy has two problems; first, the vote of an intelligent and educated person is as much worth as the vote of an undereducated, uninformed person. The second problem is there are too many of the second kind. Nonetheless, here we are 2000 years later, and we still couldn’t come up with any better or more efficient regime as an alternative.