this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
535 points (97.9% liked)

Comics

5826 readers
340 users here now

This is a community for everything comics related! A place for all comics fans.

Rules:

1- Do not violate lemmy.ml site-wide rules

2- Be civil.

3- If you are going to post NSFW content that doesn't violate the lemmy.ml site-wide rules, please mark it as NSFW and add a content warning (CW). This includes content that shows the killing of people and or animals, gore, content that talks about suicide or shows suicide, content that talks about sexual assault, etc. Please use your best judgement. We want to keep this space safe for all our comic lovers.

4- No Zionism or Hasbara apologia of any kind. We stand with Palestine 🇵🇸 . Zionists will be banned on sight.

5- The moderation team reserves the right to remove any post or comments that it deems a necessary for the well-being and safety of the members of this community, and same goes with temporarily or permanently banning any user.

Guidelines:

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] UnderpantsWeevil 5 points 3 months ago

Greece had democracy too, and it ran into the exact same basket of problems we experience today.

Candidates would smear each other through rumor campaigns, foreigners would be scapegoated for domestic problems, religious organizations would lobby for special privileges by promising their constituents' support during election season, wealthy men would bribe whomever won to guarantee them favorable treatment, and large portions of the population were disenfranchised in order to maintain a patriarchal nationalist system built on the back of slave labor.

Consequentially, people lost faith in democracy as a mechanism for selecting popular rulers and became increasingly enamored with the military as a source of domestic income, social advancement, and national pride. The Greek system ultimately failed in the face of oligarchy during the Peloponnesian Wars, reemerged in a reformed state for almost a century, and then collapsed entirely following the conquest of the Macedonians.

Plato's idealism not withstanding, his criticism is worth reading because it demonstrates a repeated pattern of human behaviors that modern political groups can learn from and respond to.