No time for tyrants, no love for leaders …

Here’s what I thought the other day. We, as in humankind, have accepted rule by tyrants for a very long time. In the knowable ancient past, going back about six thousand years or maybe more (my date memory got left behind in the Seventies) living under a tyrant often meant survival rather than slaughter. Life was brutal and you really just had to pick your poison, so to speak. And those tyrants often did pick their poison, it being a dangerous job with a phenomenal murder rate, so being an underling might well have meant a longer life span. And then if by bad luck you were a slave … not much for it but to slave away. But sometime during the Greek heyday, if my memory serves, a strange development took place, and a war was fought not for a leader, but for an idea. That idea was, roughly speaking, democracy.

[That was a terrible summation of the most interesting contents of The Ancient World, a podcast that I have been slowly working my way through. Impossible to remember all that has transpired, but a general picture has unfolded, and now I have made it to the second series, which is about the discovery of the information that was the basis of the first series. I think it is worth going back to the beginning, as it builds on itself. And not to insult the podcast, but it is great for insomnia and has a very peaceful tone as it takes you through murder and mayhem and Pharaohs and Emperors like Caligula, a real family man.]

Democracy has been taking hold for the last two millennia, with its concomitant idea of the equality of man, but is far from a truly working practice even where it is practiced, as we stumble along in this kleptocracy of a democracy. And we still live in a society divided by class to a large extent. The thing I was particularly struck by, as we in Canada elect a Trudeau while our southern pals contemplate electing a Clinton and a Bush tries to become the Republican nominee, was that we now still seem to want to live under tyrants, we just try to pick them ourselves. And we still look to dynasties. We changed the way the leaders were chosen, but we still seem to want to have individual leaders of vast territories and huge populations. One man, or woman, to rule over tens, or in the case of the U.S., hundreds of millions of diverse people. Wanting the job should be a disqualification for it in the first place, but wanting someone to take the job is likewise ludicrous. The job itself must go.

Perhaps we need something more like jury duty, where governing would be a civic duty, not a platform for demagoguery. And where the process would be more important than the personalities and their promises to deliver a future that can of course never arrive. Enough with dynasties and Great Leaders … cardboard signs and waving placards … it is time for a paradigm shift.