Twenty-two centuries ago, some Greek bloke called Polybius was hauled to Rome as a hostage, and he spent his captivity studying the place, not as a tourist, but the way a doctor studies a patient he already suspects is dying.
His conclusion was that no form of government lasts. They turn into one another, in order, like a wheel coming round.
He called it Anacyclosis.
It runs like this:
- A strong man rules well, and that is monarchy.
- His sons rule for themselves, and that is tyranny.
- The best men kill the tyrant and take his place: aristocracy, the good few.
- Their sons grow greedy: oligarchy, the rich few.
- The people rise and throw the rich out: democracy.
- And then democracy curdles into the thing Polybius dreaded most — ochlocracy, mob-rule, where the loudest voice wins — until it gets bad enough that the crowd itself begs for a strong man to make it stop. Which is where we came in.
His reason for why this keeps happening is really worth thinking about: Every government, he said, breeds the thing that kills it, the way iron breeds rust. The end isn’t an accident; it’s in the metal from the start.
What we genuinely have right now is a late democracy: the mass franchise intact in its forms, decaying in its substance. A managerial class that calls itself a meritocracy presides over a crowd that calls itself the people — each dressed up as something nobler than it is.
Leave a Reply