The Myth of Democracy

Democracy gets talked about like a sacred object. “Power of the people.” “Every vote counts.” “Your voice matters.” The language is grand, almost religious. It sounds important. It also travels remarkably well. You hear the same phrases repeated across countries, cultures, and political systems, as if they describe something universal and settled.

For a long time, I took it at face value. Voting felt like participation. Like I was involved in something larger than myself. Over time, that feeling wore off, replaced by a quieter question: what, exactly, is being offered here, and to whom?

Elections don’t really give you power. They give you something that looks like power. You’re allowed to choose between a small set of candidates who have already been filtered, funded, and made acceptable by the system they’re supposed to challenge. This isn’t unique to any one country. The names change, the parties change, the flags change, but the structure stays familiar. Choice exists, but only inside carefully drawn boundaries.

The menu rarely changes. Different slogans, different faces, sometimes even different ideologies on paper. But the underlying loyalties are predictable. Loyalty to donors. Loyalty to capital. Loyalty to staying in power. The public becomes relevant during elections and inconvenient afterward. Promises are flexible before the vote and expendable after it.

I used to think this was just a failure of execution. That maybe in a “healthier” democracy, things would work as advertised. But the pattern repeats too consistently to ignore. When people vote in ways that seriously threaten existing power, the system doesn’t collapse. It adapts.

Courts intervene. Bureaucracies stall. Lobbyists rewrite outcomes. Unelected institutions absorb the shock. Change is allowed, but only up to a point.

That’s when it becomes hard to ignore what’s actually stable in all of this. Power doesn’t rotate the way leadership does. It accumulates. It settles into institutions that don’t campaign, don’t lose elections, and don’t need popular approval to survive.

This isn’t corruption in the dramatic sense. It’s simply how power behaves once it’s allowed to harden.

Democracy, as it’s sold, isn’t primarily a mechanism for giving power to people. It’s a mechanism for legitimizing power wherever it already exists. It works because it feels participatory. It convinces people that they had a meaningful say, and that belief makes the system easier to live with.

So when I say I don’t live in a democracy, I don’t mean that I live under a dictatorship, or that voting is meaningless in every possible way. I don’t mean that elections don’t matter at all. I mean something narrower and more uncomfortable.

I mean that I live in a managed system that borrows democratic language to keep itself stable. It looks open enough, fair enough, responsive enough that most people don’t push too hard. You’re given just enough participation to feel involved, just enough choice to feel responsible.

And to be honest, I don’t see a clearly better system that could work at this scale. Maybe that’s the real trap. Maybe management is the only thing that scales, and democracy, as an ideal, gets bent to fit it.

Across the world, in different forms and with different accents, the same illusion keeps working. Not because it’s perfect, but because it’s sufficient.