alt Hacker News> then why trust them to decide who makes & enforces laws?
Firstly, it's not black and white: humans are swayed by propaganda, but not entirely.
Historically:
We tried feudalism, and we have run limited experiments with one-party states.
Classical republics with a citizen class might obviate the fuckwit-voter problem somewhat; but the French Revolution made the idea of a political underclass unpalatable, and I'm not sure the conditions still hold. Classical Athenian education was sufficient to prepare the gentry for the problems of classical Athens; society today has more moving parts.
Benevolent and wise dictatorship would be nice, but the "benevolent" and "wise" parts may be unrealistic expectation.
I like anarchy, but i don't believe it scales to nation size.
I am open to being convinced that some given form of government would be ideal, but i very much doubt that i can be convinced that there's any path to get there, and I'll always be skeptical that the given idea will be as sweet as promised in practice. Revolution tends to pan out badly.
We are all motes in a complex system. The fact that we can perceive and reason about that system is a cosmic cruelty.
I think the real lesson of the french revolution is that the petty nobility will run things right into the ground for a quick buck if you let them.
I don't think it was that the lower class was disenfranchised, it was that disenfranchising them made the petty nobility comparatively over-enfranchised.
This isn't exactly a hot take. All those memes about good times and weak men resonate for a reason. The British hereditary nobility did better, a little, but also were very much not great.
And of course there's a pretty obvious parallel between these groups of people the the professional managerial class in modern western societies that lack a rigid social class.