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> Limited human lifespans are directly related to the successor problem of monarchies or dictatorships and are a major reason why democracies are more stable.

by josefx 5y ago

> Limited human lifespans are directly related to the successor problem of monarchies or dictatorships and are a major reason why democracies are more stable. Given how long some monarchies have been around and how quickly some democracies fall to extremism that would actually be interesting to compare.

kibwen 5y ago
> Given how long some monarchies have been around Don't discount survivorship bias. The Japanese monarchy lasted (as a political entity) for 2600 years, but in that time consider how many thousands of other autocracies rose and fell throughout human civilization. It's a bit like pointing at some old, well-preserved houses and saying "they sure made houses to last back in the day", when in fact all the houses from back-in-the-day which were not built to last have long since rotted away, and whose presence cannot attest as a counterexample.
- est31 5y ago
  Yeah it seems to help that you are on an island. The english monarchy has lasted for around the same order of magnitude.
hnbad 5y ago
"Primitive" societies were likely fairly anarchistic and monarchies probably arose from "war chiefs" with religious justifications (think divine right of kings but before Christianity). Representative democracies are fairly recent. Even popular examples like Rome had very strict ideas about who was eligible to vote and even in the US women and Black people hadn't been allowed to vote for the longest time of its existence. I'm not sure what examples of "falling to extremism" you're thinking of, but to pre-empt the two most obvious ones: Weimar Germany was an extremely young republic and its fall to extremism was initiated by conservatives trying to prevent the rise of communists to avoid losing their wealth after the republic had already weakened their political power; and the Soviet Union pretty much directly followed a violent revolution to overthrow a monarchy and jumped right into military dictatorship while having to fight an enemy hellbent on depopulating most of its territory. Most of the others I can think of are successor states to Soviet republics that either were autocratic already or rapidly turned into kleptocracies after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and only adopted the dressings of democracy prior to falling apart. Also most stable monarchies aren't dictatorial. Chinese dynasties were famously bureaucratic and European monarchies had fairly intricate aristocracies that frequently got involved when it came to less clear-cut lines of succession. It's probably best to think of these as oligarchies, which as a category is probably also a good fit for many so-called democracies.

by josefx 5y ago

kibwen 5y ago

> Given how long some monarchies have been around Don't discount survivorship bias. The Japanese monarchy lasted (as a political entity) for 2600 years, but in that time consider how many thousands of other autocracies rose and fell throughout human civilization. It's a bit like pointing at some old, well-preserved houses and saying "they sure made houses to last back in the day", when in fact all the houses from back-in-the-day which were not built to last have long since rotted away, and whose presence cannot attest as a counterexample.

est31 5y ago
Yeah it seems to help that you are on an island. The english monarchy has lasted for around the same order of magnitude.

hnbad 5y ago

"Primitive" societies were likely fairly anarchistic and monarchies probably arose from "war chiefs" with religious justifications (think divine right of kings but before Christianity). Representative democracies are fairly recent. Even popular examples like Rome had very strict ideas about who was eligible to vote and even in the US women and Black people hadn't been allowed to vote for the longest time of its existence. I'm not sure what examples of "falling to extremism" you're thinking of, but to pre-empt the two most obvious ones: Weimar Germany was an extremely young republic and its fall to extremism was initiated by conservatives trying to prevent the rise of communists to avoid losing their wealth after the republic had already weakened their political power; and the Soviet Union pretty much directly followed a violent revolution to overthrow a monarchy and jumped right into military dictatorship while having to fight an enemy hellbent on depopulating most of its territory. Most of the others I can think of are successor states to Soviet republics that either were autocratic already or rapidly turned into kleptocracies after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and only adopted the dressings of democracy prior to falling apart. Also most stable monarchies aren't dictatorial. Chinese dynasties were famously bureaucratic and European monarchies had fairly intricate aristocracies that frequently got involved when it came to less clear-cut lines of succession. It's probably best to think of these as oligarchies, which as a category is probably also a good fit for many so-called democracies.