Comment by Al-Khwarizmi

I actually sympathize with all that. Over the past few decades, I have slowly become increasingly skeptical about true, unfettered democracy being the best form of government. In the past, although the level of education probably was worse than now, the fact that people got their news from rather centralized sources controlled by elites acted as a "nutjob filter". With social networks, we are witnessing what should be the true power of democracy (people electing candidates in spite of what the elites think), but it can easily create monsters.

I just wish the Western world would drop the hypocrisy in this respect, and stop claiming to defend more democracy than it actually does. A relevant problem is that democracy is often used as an easy excuse to keep people content. Singapore is a hugely successful country in most respects, with better quality of life than most Western countries, but we shouldn't take example from it because we have democracy! China is constantly growing and improving the quality of life of their citizens, is still behind most of the West in that respect but on the path to overtake us, but it doesn't matter, we have democracy! Maybe if we weren't constantly claiming the moral high ground, when as you mentioned our own democracies are at most relative and the difference with more authoritarian countries is a matter of degree; we could be more self-critical and focus on actually fixing things.