Elon Musk’s Free-Speech Thunderdome
If you’d never heard of democracy, if you lived in a parallel universe where voting required proven expertise or years of study or a urine test, you’d think “one person, one vote,” was an insane way to run a society.
“Wait a minute,” you’d say, “you want to give everybody, no matter how ignorant or incompetent or incontinent they are, an equal say in selecting our government? You’re suggesting we stake the future of our country on a fickle, lobbyist-funded popularity contest?!”
You wouldn’t be alone in your skepticism.
Winston Churchill believed “the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”
Emil Cioran called democracy “a festival of mediocrity.”
And my personal favourite, H. L. Mencken, described it as “the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”
You’re not supposed to say this out loud, but the average person (and the vast majority of above-average persons), has nothing like the economic, sociological or geopolitical knowledge needed to make political decisions. And even if they did, almost none of the people clamouring for their votes do.
