It very well may be that dictatorship is inevitable and democracy is a luxury that humanity can no longer afford.

 The details don’t matter very much as long as the overarching theory is agreed upon.  My parents generation agreed on an overarching framework of laws and traditions and dealt with “wrong doing” accordingly.  They were definitely not perfect.  Individual citizens did not know very much about the legal system, but they knew “right” from “wrong.”  Today’s generation does not agree on much of anything in the way of overarching theory, even though we mindlessly insist that we must protect democracy even while we do everything in our power to destroy it.  The American constitution served us adequately for over two hundred years, but now we are picking at it relentlessly and are suggesting corrections that will destroy it.  We have changed from a group of likeminded mongrel adventurers trying to conquer the world into an assemblage of quarreling children afraid of our own shadow.  The focus of our ire is our leadership, while the problem that besets us is within our own ranks.  You and I are the problem, not The Donald or Scranton Joe.  They are just two politicians trying to say and do what will get them elected.  Neither one of them will right the ship because you and I have our head in the wrong place.  One of them will “win” the next election and every single one of the people who did not vote for him will do everything in their power to make him fail.  Amazingly, they do not care that they are also ensuring that America fails.  The clue as to how much trouble we are in is that there is not one single voice that can overarch the societal divides that exist, nor can we stop those divides from fracturing further into even more mindlessness.  Political groupings are not based on shared values as much as they are antipathy for the other.  We will vote for Joe because we hate Donald, or vice versa - not because we believe that either one of them will bring us together.

Meanwhile, technology is advancing relentlessly and political groups are incorporating it into their effort to achieve control of society.  Technology permits mass communication to replace individual thought to an extent never seen before in human history.  A logical corollary to advances in technology is improved central control of populations.  Combine this with exploding population and you speed the conversion from democratic governance to dictatorial governance in any society that is not already engaged in open hostilities, which is far too often the end result of authoritarian competition.  Most of humanity is, today, governed by one or another form of authoritarianism.  Although the basics are the same, the form varies dramatically, with the flavor of the month being dressed in cultural regalia consistent with the underlying society.  The details of China’s “dictatorship” is very different than what we find in Russia, or North Korea, or Iran, or Venezuela, but the underlying theme is consistent - dictatorial decision-making.

As population pressure on the earth’s fixed resources mounts, it very well may be that dictatorship is inevitable and democracy is a luxury that humanity can no longer afford.  The joker in the pack being nuclear weapons.  Humanity is cleverly inventing the tools that it will need to dramatically reduce the overpopulation problem.  The part of all of this that continues to fascinate me is the ability of my fellow citizens to ignore it.  We are knowingly walking into the gas chambers pretending that we believe that we are going to take a shower.  Reality is too terrifying to admit its existence.  Better to focus on the wrong doing of one or the other politician and continue to spout our naive protestations of principal.