Dominic Cummings: belief

Transcript context

…But how come? Why is that the implication of the end state of democracy? That it’ll implode? I mean, look at what happened in Athens. They tried and it only really worked as long as you had the old aristocracy managing it. I’m not saying this is necessarily what I believe, all I’m saying is that a reasonable perspective is that the old system worked because the old aristocracy managed it. Pericles being the obvious example from the old Alcmaeonidae family. Once they lost their grip and demagogues like Cleon took over, chaos, demagoguery and endless demands on the treasury, the people voting handouts for themselves. It collapses and the cycle repeats. Similar sort of arguments about the Roman Republic. So I think they wouldn’t be surprised at the collapse post war, post 1918 in Western Europe. Maybe an interesting question is then if you look at Bismarck, who you’ve done a huge dive on, in that case, you have a system where after him, the system he set up couldn’t survive and yada, yada, yada, World War I. Whereas Lee Kuan Yew, another person you’ve studied deeply, he had meticulously set up a system so that even after he gave up the leadership, it would be a competent, successful government. And I guess we’ll see how it turns out. But Singapore seems to be running fine. They both are these strong figures in the context of a democracy. What is the correct model here? And then how does this solve the succession problem?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.