A despotism may almost be defined as a tired democracy. As fatigue falls on a community, the citizens are less inclined for that eternal vigilance which has truly been called the price of liberty; and they prefer to arm only one single sentinel to watch the city while they sleep.
G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
1 Comment
April 6, 2009 at 9:22 pm
“Democracy is a thing which is always breaking down through the complexity of civilization” as each individual member feels increasingly as though his decisions were insignificant compared with the sheer size of the whole and each statesman is spurred to ever more ambitious action by the possibility of deriving ever greater benefits from coordinated, collective action. In other words, the more complex our society, the more the individual abdicates and the more the states seeks to take on. We vastly under-estimate what we can do for ourselves in the context of our own lives and communities, and we vastly over-estimate what the state can do on our behalf. Its not that our politicians are such failures [though many may be], its that we expect too much from politicians.