Democracy is not exactly a single thing though, but current forms kind of do have that quality, yes. "Casting binary votes on specific questions and no take-bac

Democracy is not exactly a single thing though, but current forms kind of do have that quality, yes. "Casting binary votes on specific questions and no take-backs" is actually a kind of terrible model of democracy. There's got to be other ways. If we take "a healthy interpersonal relationship between people with mutual respect, self-knowledge, and strong communication skills" as a model, we can see how two or more people continually grow into the kinds of lives they want to lead by working together, and that's the kind of democracy I'd like to have. Obviously, this doesn't scale. But that doesn't mean we just give up and take the lazy, clearly bad option. We ought to evaluate the situation we're actually in and adapt. I mean, FPTP is obviously bad, but if we're being honest, we should expect a plurality if not majority of people to be unable to recognize a bad decision even when it's presented to them as such. We know that if you run enough emotionally-triggering ads and you will get supporters of virtually any idea - this is basically the concept of manufactured consent. And I think our society can't really evolve in a healthy way until we accept that more widely. (By accept, I mean "beware of", not "exploit".) If you want a program to run efficiently and give you good results, you don't just keep taking lazier and lazier approaches and delete functions you don't understand. You carefully refactor. It's a continuous process. That's what we're supposed to do with our democratic institutions, but unfortunately, we're stuck focusing on specific outputs so much that we can't even understand the root problems.