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There is some truth to the old adage, "Democracy is the worst form of government-except for all the others." Certainly democracy has a wide variety of flaws, and if you think even the concept of rational voting itself is perfect, you should read some of the voting paradoxes of Condorcet and Sen.

What democracy allows, however, is the ability to self-correct; if people find that a particular style of government or policy is not effective for their own well-being, eventually they will act to change it. What they change it to will probably not be the best possible, but it will be different than what came before, and in most cases it will be better. Compare this to a dictatorship, which is extremely simple and efficient, and can certainly have qualified and benevolent leaders in some circumstances: a dictatorship is self-*reinforcing,* not self-correcting. Policies that rob citizens of freedom can be fought in a democracy; in a dictatorship they only bring more policies that rob more freedoms.

Indeed, democracy would actually be close to ideal, if we could only manage something in politics that we already do in science: compare notes! If instead of *debating* so much, trying to turn people to one side or another by manipulation, we actually considered our objective to be the neutral search for factual and ethical truth, we might have a shot at improving things. If we considered the arguments of our "opponents," not to find ways to defeat them, but to determine what their genuine merits were, we might be able to synthesize instead of polarize. If we could reach a rational consensus on the important issues, democracy would nearly always pick the best choice.

Of course, that takes a lot of work, and it requires a populace that believes in honesty, education, and truth above simplicity, anti-intellectualism, and partisanship. Elections need to be changed from "winning" and "losing" to *considering* and *deciding*; we should not vote the way we play checkers, but the way we decide who to marry.

I have hope that all this is possible; but we have to want it. We have to see beyond the party lines and the political posturing. The fate of the free world is at stake.

Learn more about this author, Patrick Julius.
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