John Wilkes Booth

so this is basically just a sort of thought experiment or to put it more bluntly an assortment of random opinions i've come to hold and a way to explore certain hypothetical questions and situations in an attempt to stave off boredom at work.

tl:dr, i don't know if i think democracy is such a good system anymore and i have questions about top-down vs bottom-up solutions towards creating an effective and efficient system. maybe some of you can either share your own thoughts or criticize mine and make me rethink them.

basically i have come to question democracy and more specifically democracy combined with capitalism. it seems to me that this will always be the perfect recipe for propaganda as a tool for wealthy people to pursue goals that will ultimately benefit them even at the overall expense of the population at large.

one of the only semi-convincing objections to this that i've encountered is the idea that in more healthy democracies like switzerland, true democratic principles at work have produced even better results than our own half-assed system here in the states. while the light amount of research i've done about the swiss system since hearing about this does lead me to believe there might be legitimate benefits to their system, at the same time i also feel that they have a very different type of situation to wrestle with than us and ultimately their problems vs our problems are not necessarily that similar that we can assume that a system that works for a relatively small country will also work for a massive superpower/borderline empire.

i also have found an interesting example of democracy ****ing up in switzerland and interestingly enough the problem stems from one of the more thoroughly democratic facets of their system. basically when they decided to ban minarets or whatever. that to me seems like basically a sort of persecution of a local minority probably because some of the natives are discontented with some of the cultural problems caused for them by their country's immigration policies. this motion was actually brought into action by a popular initiative from what i recall reading, and not as some sort of organized political agenda.

and this leads me to think that the mob mentality can often take over and go in irrational ways since normal people can't be bothered to really try to understand what a complicated mess modern civilization really is all the time and thus don't always come to the right conclusions about how to fix things. and also and probably more commonly over here in the u.s. this same mob irrationality can easily be tapped into by more powerful and charismatic agents to pursue their own agendas through the power of popularity.

and i know some people say yea but you can strictly regulate elections and campaign finance and all that but once again i go back to thinking about capitalism and the power of popular appeal. it seems like commercials are every bit as brainwashing as political ads. really it just seems weird to me to say its fine for a company to drill it into people's heads to buy their product but it's over the line for that company to try to manipulate public opinion on politics to their own benefit. both seem to have the same goal and the same basic disregard for the overall well-being of society. it really seems like inventing fake rules that you can't enforce while trying to play a board game.

and i tend to think even if you managed to take the money all the way out of political campaigns specifically the politics would still be more about slogans and popular appeal than really making logical and smart decisions. it's like having an argument around a bunch of random lower-to-middle class people. the winner will very often not have the best answer, just the biggest voice.

and then i know people say but direct democracy can work much better from the ground up but i feel that actually it would be really uncoordinated and sloppy. like if you try to design a system you almost always want to take a top-down approach because then its easier to see the full scope of what you are trying to achieve and how you're going to achieve it.

so i was wondering about possible ways to make a dictatorship actually better than democracy. cause i know they have tended to turn into an even bigger cynical nightmare but i wonder if there is a way to make a system that has a top-down approach to running a country/society without losing the overall goal of consistently improving that society instead of exploiting power for personal benefit. and that's the really hard part but i feel like it might be possible.

say the top smartest scientists, engineers, diplomats, etc get together and work out an overall strategy for successfully managing such a system. like some objective criteria are defined up front and basically to deter abuse of power the smart people might get fired if their numbers start getting ****ed up. it would have to be run by some sort of computer that basically is impartial and says oh you ****ed up bye bye. and everyone with power to act buys into it collectively cause they continue to draw power from it unless they try to exploit the system to their gain.

what do you guys think?