RE: We have a Democracy and thus are wiser than you back water Dictatorship types...
There is a troubling development: a dysfunctional system is given a beautiful name and suddenly, the beautiful name is associated with something bad.
The dictatorship of a majority over the few, the dictatorship of two parties over the people, the dictatorship of an elite-owned mass media in collusion with the ruling oligarchy – all this is NOT democracy; even though we may have been led to believe that by calling the systems in the western world "democratic". They are not.
"demos" is the people, an older translation even is the village. Democracy, in its literal translation, is the rule of the people over themselves, the rule of each village over itself. In a sense, democracy is indistinguishable from an-archy, the absence of a ruler or a ruling class.
I wish we wouldn't let the current rulers hijack the beautiful words of the dreams of freedom and autonomy our forefathers and -thinkers sketched.
Word hijacking is the mode of operation for propaganda. It happens frequently. :) I do believe you likely have a point. Yet the form of Democracy I am writing about is the form that Democracy (hijacked though it is) has taken for a century or two. So it is likely what people will think of with the word. The original version of which Socrates was not a fan of himself is not what anyone is really proposing in governments when they are recommending Democracy.
Technically we are also a Democratic republic, but even the original is very much at the whims and experience levels of the electorate. Majority rule when the majority are voting on something they have no experience with is not a good thing.
I resteemed a post that shared more on the Socrates angle.
I have seen this increasingly often in the last years; at first, I was surprised that people considered themselves anti-democratic until I understood they were talking about the rule of majority, or "democratic" as opposed to "republic". It makes me sad to see this beautiful word, and the ideas originally associated with it, used to describe the unjust and tyrannical systems we live in today. The problem runs deeper; if we allow our words to be taken from us, we become speechless. When we become speechless, we lose the only power we have; just as when people associate "anarchy" (the absence of a ruler) with "anomie" (the absence of rules).
I think I saw it. It was great, and each point was valid, but also calls "representative parliamentarism" by the name of "democracy", as @thegermandude pointed out. But instead of c&ping my nitpick there, I'll simply make a post :)
Shoot me a reply to it here with a link when you are done if you don't mind. It doesn't sound like one I'd like to accidentally miss with the level of activity on here these days.