2568. Democracy and climate change.

The difficulty we face is a defining moment in history, maybe the defining moment for our species (and all species). We are mostly democratically inclined, but the needed approach (especially cutting co2, are not going to be popular because the the needed actions to cut co2 will (are) tearing apart most lives.

Well, well so we need a central command, a dictatorship. How the hell did we get here?

In wiser times there wa an understanding (see the histories of Polybius, an ancient Greek historian) who built on the idea, widely held in Greece and Rome, that forms of governance are cyclical A to B to C as in democracy to oligarchy to monarchy (or, in the negative, mobs, kleptocracy, tyrrany, ). and that wisdom is seeing the need to alter the form pf government as the key issues change. For example, democracy is good when the issue is internal, like distribution of income, but bad when the issue is external threat to which democracies would divide the state in factions.

Are we capable of such thinking? It is really difficult because we almost have no political thinkers. Western society, now imitated elsewhere, outsourced political thinking to economics which cannot get past investment and growth.

With a little hard thinking you can work out how this applies to our own time.