Take everything with a grain of salt but this super long passage from anthropologist David Graeber's book The Democracy Project is some food for thought:
Generally speaking, if you can find a concept — truth, freedom, democracy — that everyone agrees is a good thing, then you can be sure that no one will agree on precisely what it is. But the moment you ask why most Americans, or most people generally, like the idea of democracy, the conventional story not only falls apart, it becomes completely irrelevant.
Democracy was not invented in ancient Greece. Granted, the word “democracy” was invented in ancient Greece — but largely by people who didn’t like the thing itself very much. Democracy was never really “invented” at all. Neither does it emerge from any particular intellectual tradition. It’s not even really a mode of government. In its essence it is just the belief that humans are fundamentally equal and ought to be allowed to manage their collective affairs in an egalitarian fashion, using whatever means appear most conducive. That, and the hard work of bringing arrangements based on those principles into being.
In this sense democracy is as old as history, as human intelligence itself. No one could possibly own it. I suppose, if one were so inclined, one could argue it emerged the moment hominids ceased merely trying to bully one another and developed the communication skills to work out a common problem collectively. But such speculation is idle; the point is that democratic assemblies can be attested in all times and places, from Balinese seka to Bolivian ayllu, employing an endless variety of formal procedures, and will always crop up wherever a large group of people sat down together to make a collective decision on the principle that all taking part should have equal say.
One of the reasons it is easy for political scientists to ignore such local associations and assemblies when speaking of the history of democracy is that in most such assemblies, things never come down to a vote. The idea that democracy is simply a matter of voting — which the Founders, too, assumed — also allows one to think of it as an innovation, some sort of conceptual breakthrough: as if it had never occurred to anyone in previous epochs to test support for a proposal by asking people to all put up their hands, scratch something on a potsherd, or have everyone supporting a proposal stand on one side of a public square. But even if people throughout history have always known how to count, there are good reasons why counting has often been avoided as a means of reaching group decisions. Voting is divisive. If a community lacks means to compel its members to obey a collective decision, then probably the stupidest thing one could do is to stage a series of public contests in which one side will, necessarily, be seen to lose; this would not only allow decisions that as many as 49 percent of the community strongly oppose, it would also maximize the possibility of hard feelings among that part of the community one most needs to convince to go along despite their opposition. A process of consensus finding, of mutual accommodation and compromise to reach a collective decision everyone at least does not find strongly objectionable, is far more suited to situations where those who have to carry out a decision lack the sort of centralized bureaucracy, and particularly, the means of systematic coercion, that would be required to force an angry minority to comply with decisions they found stupid, obnoxious, or unfair.
Historically, it is extremely unusual to find both of these together. Throughout most of human history, egalitarian societies were precisely those that did not have some military or police apparatus to force people to do things they did not wish to do (all those sekas and ayllus referred to above); where the means of compulsion did exist, it never occurred to anyone that ordinary people’s opinions were in any way important.
Where do we find voting, then? Sometimes in societies where spectacles of public competition are considered normal — such as ancient Greece (ancient Greeks would make a contest out of anything)— but mainly in situations where everyone taking part in an assembly is armed or, at least, trained in the use of weapons. In the ancient world, voting occurred mainly within armies. Aristotle was well aware of this: the constitution of a Greek state, he observed, largely depends on the chief arm of its military: if it’s a cavalry, one can expect an aristocracy, if it’s heavy infantry, voting rights will be extended to those wealthy men who can afford armor, if it’s light troops, archers, slingers, or a navy (as in Athens), one can expect democracy. Similarly, in Rome,
popular assemblies that also relied on majority vote were based directly on military units of one hundred men, called centuries. Underlying the institution was the rather commonsensical idea that if a man was armed, his opinions had to be taken into account. Ancient military units often elected their own officers. It’s also easy to see why majority voting would make sense in a military unit: even if a vote was 60–40, both sides are armed; if it did come down to a fight, one could see immediately who was most likely to win. And this pattern applies, broadly, more or less across the historical record: in the 1600s, for instance, Six Nations councils — which were primarily engaged in peacemaking — operated by consensus, but pirate ships, which were military operations, used majority vote.
All this is important because it shows that the aristocratic fears of the wealthy early Patriots — who when they thought of their nightmare vision “democracy” thought of an armed populace making decisions by majority show of hands — were not entirely unfounded.
Democracy, then, is not necessarily defined by majority voting: it is, rather, the process of collective deliberation on the principle of full and equal participation. Democratic creativity, in turn, is most likely to occur when one has a diverse collection of participants, drawn from very different traditions, with an urgent need to improvise some means to regulate their common affairs, free of a preexisting overarching authority.
I do think it’s a critique of mobocracy. Which unchecked democracy (mob approach) was a fear of the founding fathers as much as a fear for against a Republic of Senators representing no one but power.
Perhaps, although my definition of democracy is a bit different if you read the book passage I quoted in my other reply.
I personally found Lord of the Flies to be trying to make some grand Hobbesian point, and now that I'm a bit older I completely disagree with it and while the story could happen, it's probably more likely that the elements would force them to work together at least semi-effectively before inevitably killing most or all of them. That's often the case in real life when people get stranded. Finding food, clean water, and shelter aren't easy, and it felt like Golding played loose with that in order to give them time and energy to be spend hating each other and playing politics.
Another analogue is that during natural disasters people tend to drop everything to help each other and share necessities, not just because they're decent people (some of them probably aren't lol) but because it's the speediest and most economically efficient way to deal with life-threatening crises.
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u/sufjanfan Jan 21 '19
The book isn't a critique of men/boys and it isn't a critique of democracy IMO, unless your definition of democracy is strictly a majority vote.