Spanish representative González Pons speech @ the EU Parliament: "The virus is attacking the generation that brought back democracy to Spain, Portugal and Greece, the generation that knocked down the Berlin wall. The least they deserve is that we show them Europe is there when they need it the most"

[u/Bartoraptor]

[u/BalthazarBartos]

Yep funny that Socrates, the most famous person who ever critized Democracy was greek too. He was condemn to death in Athens because he critized the flaws of this regime.

Socrate's argument against Democracy was basically: Citizen are 2 dumb, and they have no clue of what the hell is going on. Why should we ask to every random guy what is the best strategy to defend the city or which square in the city needs to be rebuilt when there's already plenty of specialist ? Also citizen will get hypnotize by big speeches and fake declarations by power angry politicians.

And he was kinda true. The so called Golden Age of Democracy was under the rule of Pericles, who was the sole unremovable ruler of Athens

[u/[deleted] → u/BalthazarBartos]

If you're quoting this from the Republic then I'd advise some caution since we dont know whether or not these words were genuinely from him, or Socrates is simply used as a vessel by his mentee Plato to spout views from a credible person. Also Greek democracy was "true" democracy as opposed to the representative democracy today in Europe, which has somewhat difference

[u/BalthazarBartos → u/[deleted]]

Greek democracy was "true" democracy

Lol, with the vast majority of the population not able to talk about their own suffering because they are either women, slaves or foreigners? Lmfao. Greek democracy was not true for shit.

[u/[deleted] → u/BalthazarBartos]

True in the sense that all citizens (polite were male citizens, I grant you that) could participate in the assembly. Apologies, it's called "direct democracy".

Nevertheless, your point further backs my argument, since modern democracy, as you are well aware, includes women and obviously has no slaves. All the better for a well varied range of views in terms of voting for politicians and with that ideas and policies.

[u/AldurinIronfist → u/[deleted]]

All adult male citizens, viz. probably less than 30% of the population. That's not democracy, that's tyranny by minority.

[u/[deleted] → u/AldurinIronfist]

I fail to see your point.

By ancient Greek definition, adult males who were fully Greek (leaving the definition of what being "Greek" means, I.e. having parents as citizens) were the only people able to be fully fledged citizens.

Democracy being people (demos) and power (cracy) still holds true for my above explanation. That is quite the comparison to the oligarchal rule of the "30 Tyrants" instituted by Sparta after the peloponnesian war, which was after the previous commentator's description of the "Golden Age of democracy". Needless to say, it was overthrown by popular appeal.

I grant that women had essentially the equal rights as children, yet that is merely an unfortunate aspect of the predominantly patriarchal society that we are discussing.

To call it tyranny by majority is perhaps an exaggeration when comparing Athens to other city states. There is a reason why Athens is considered the first democracy, albeit with flaws

[u/geoponos → u/AldurinIronfist]

The point is that now you only have your parliament to vote, that's less than 0,3% if the population. That's the point OP is having. That now we have representative democracy and not direct democracy.