“Democracy is the tyranny of the uninformed” Count Dracula (character), Dracula, Netflix series

Again our protagonist utters an interesting and thought inspiring phrase. I just love the writer of this show for picking out short and subtle ways to distil momentous arguments that could fill many pages in a philosophy manuscript. Here we see the Plato argument against democracy as a structure of societal organisation.

Plato felt that democracy was the imposition of the will of the uninformed majority, on the informed and enlightened minority. What was true about this postulate 25 centuries ago is also true now. Most people are not engaged in examining society, they do not study structure and do not read manifestos, but they do exercise their right to pick the people who will make all the decisions that will affect the lives of all people. If you think about it for a while it looks like a flawed system, like picking a card or tossing dice.

Plato favoured the idea that a person could be educated to be a statesman, that given the instruction and allowed to lead, that person could then be picked from a class as the best potential leader, by a cohort of people who already occupied positions of power. He thought that this could work better than democracy, and he may have been correct. Modern democracy is no more than a popularity contest in the USA and the UK, our leaders are those guys who we think we like or otherwise, yet we have no idea what they will do when they get where they want to be. We trusted Blair and he engaged in killing hundreds of thousands of people on what turned out to be a lie, we trusted Cameron and he enforced the harshest of conditions on the least wealthy people so as to save the wealthy minority from losing some of their excess wealth, we trusted Thatcher and she sold off everything we collectively owned at low prices so that rich people could get richer, we trusted Johnson and he turned out to be after the cash for his pals, we trusted Starmer and he has kept none of the promises he previously made etc….

Maybe Dracula and Plato were on to something?

Paul S Wilson