The Failure of Democracy
A common controversial stance is that democracies, as they are currently organized, are horrible governing structures. This sentiment has not only been attached to the United States’ democracy, but also businesses’ boards of directors, family offices, groups in which decisions are made through a traditional voting system, and many other democratic assemblies.
A quote attributed to Churchill[[15]](#_ftn15) goes: “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried.” He wasn’t wrong; along many metrics, democracies are the best form of governing structures for states that have ever been tried, however not that many unique governing structures have been tried at the level of the state.
When a category of governance systematically sucks, this is one of the most common causes: For whatever reason, systematic experimentation with different models was not an option. In the case of governing structures at the level of the state, there is just not a lot of room for experimentation or even practical implementation of an optimal system in theory. You have to convince different groups with different interests to try this thing for a few decades and if you fail at that, people are likely to die.
Only in a very, very few instances in history have people thought: “Yeah, let’s try something totally new with no precedent.” This aversion to trying new things is so entrenched that there was even a case during the medieval period in which, upon the death of the last of a noble line, one Eastern European nation began putting out advertisements in other countries looking for an aristocrat to come and be king because—hey—we can’t risk trying making just anyone king.
This is why almost all democracies founded after the U.S. formed are near carbon copies of the U.S. system with iterative modifications. This is kind of insane when you think about the context in which the U.S. system was created (an extremely contentious last-minute compromise to patch up the failed “continental congress model”), but hey, it’s one of the only systems with a proven track record.
Heck, the only reason the U.S. government was even a little new was that it drew some lessons from local colonial governments, which had experimented with some wackier governance models, thereby creating one of the only times in history in which a new form of governance was created by a group of people already living in something of a Petri dish of weird governance structures. But even this was artificially assisted through the heavy borrowing of ideas from the Iroquois confederacy governing model.
Another common reason governing structures end up being garbage is that they are copied from an effective system that was designed for a different environment or optimized for a different outcome. In general, corporate governance structures are fairly well designed: They are often intentionally designed, have been experimented with, and optimized for clear, measurable success metrics. The problem with corporate structures, like boards, is that they are used in all sorts of other environments where they have no business operating, such as family offices and nonprofits. Why on earth should we use slight iterations on a system designed and optimized to make money to run our family legacies and philanthropic ventures?
Governing structures also commonly fail when their creation happens organically and iteratively, which either produces structures that were common at the time of formation or old-fashioned dominance hierarchies.