How often have you heard the quote in one form or anoth­er? “Democ­ra­cy is the worst form of Gov­ern­ment,” said Win­ston Churchill in 1947, “except for all those oth­er forms that have been tried from time to time.…” The sen­ti­ment express­es two cul­tur­al val­ues many Amer­i­cans are trained to hold uncrit­i­cal­ly: the pri­ma­cy of democ­ra­cy and the bur­den­some­ness of gov­ern­ment as a nec­es­sary evil.

In his new book Toward Democ­ra­cy, Har­vard his­to­ri­an James T. Klop­pen­berg argues that these ideas arose fair­ly recent­ly with “most­ly Protes­tants, at least at first,” notes Kirkus, in whose hands “the idea of democ­ra­cy as a dan­ger­ous doc­trine of the mob was reshaped into an ide­al.” Much of this trans­for­ma­tion “occurred in the for­mer British colonies that became the Unit­ed States, where, at least from a British nobleman’s point of view, mob rule did take hold.”

The mod­ern revamp­ing of democ­ra­cy into a sacred set of uni­ver­sal insti­tu­tions has defined our under­stand­ing of the term. Just as the West has co-opt­ed clas­si­cal Athen­ian archi­tec­ture as sym­bol­ic of demo­c­ra­t­ic puri­ty, it has often co-opt­ed Greek phi­los­o­phy. But as any­one who has ever read Plato’s Repub­lic knows, Greek philoso­phers were high­ly sus­pi­cious of democ­ra­cy, and could not con­ceive of a func­tion­ing egal­i­tar­i­an soci­ety with full suf­frage and free­dom of speech.

Socrates, espe­cial­ly, says Alain de Bot­ton in the School of Life video above, “was por­trayed in the dia­logues of Pla­to as huge­ly pes­simistic about the whole busi­ness of democ­ra­cy.” In the ide­al soci­ety Socrates con­structs in the Repub­lic, he famous­ly argues for restrict­ed free­dom of move­ment, strict cen­sor­ship accord­ing to moral­is­tic civic virtues, and a guardian sol­dier class and the rule of philoso­pher kings.

In Book VI, Socrates points out the “flaws of democ­ra­cy by com­par­ing a soci­ety to a ship.” If you were going on a sea voy­age, “who would you ide­al­ly want decid­ing who was in charge of the ves­sel, just any­one, or peo­ple edu­cat­ed in the rules and demands of sea­far­ing?” Unless we wish to be obtuse­ly con­trar­i­an, we must invari­ably answer the lat­ter, as does Socrates’ inter­locu­tor Adeiman­tus. Why then should just any of us, with­out regard to lev­el of skill, expe­ri­ence, or edu­ca­tion, be allowed to select the rulers of a coun­try?

The grim irony of Socrates’ skep­ti­cism, de Bot­ton observes, is that he him­self was put to death after a vote by 500 Athe­ni­ans. Rather than the typ­i­cal elit­ism of pure­ly aris­to­crat­ic think­ing, how­ev­er, Socrates insist­ed that “only those who had thought about issues ratio­nal­ly and deeply should be let near a vote.” Says de Bot­ton, “We have for­got­ten this dis­tinc­tion between an intel­lec­tu­al democ­ra­cy and a democ­ra­cy by birthright. We have giv­en the vote to all with­out con­nect­ing it to wis­dom.” (He does not tell us whom he means by “we.”)

For Socrates, so-called “birthright democ­ra­cy” was inevitably sus­cep­ti­ble to dem­a­goguery. Socrates “knew how eas­i­ly peo­ple seek­ing elec­tion could exploit our desire for easy answers” by telling us what we want­ed to hear. We should heed Socrates’ warn­ings against mob rule and the dan­gers of dem­a­goguery, de Bot­ton argues, and con­sid­er democ­ra­cy as “some­thing that is only ever as good as the edu­ca­tion sys­tem that sur­rounds it.” It’s a potent idea, and one often repeat­ed with ref­er­ence to a sim­i­lar warn­ing from Thomas Jef­fer­son.

What de Bot­ton does not men­tion in his short video, how­ev­er, is that Socrates also advised that his rulers lie to the cit­i­zen­ry, secur­ing their trust not with false promis­es and seduc­tive blan­d­ish­ments, but with ide­ol­o­gy. As the Inter­net Ency­clo­pe­dia of Phi­los­o­phy sum­ma­rizes, Socrates “sug­gests that [the rulers] need to tell the cit­i­zens a myth that should be believed by sub­se­quent gen­er­a­tions in order for every­one to accept his posi­tion in the city”—and to accept the legit­i­ma­cy of the rulers. The myth—like mod­ern sci­en­tif­ic racism and eugenics—divides the cit­i­zen­ry into an essen­tial hier­ar­chy, which Socrates sym­bol­izes by the met­als gold, sil­ver, and bronze.

But who deter­mines these cat­e­gories, or which vot­ers are the more “ratio­nal,” or what that cat­e­go­ry entails? How do we rec­on­cile the egal­i­tar­i­an premis­es of democ­ra­cy with the caste sys­tems of the utopi­an Repub­lic, in which vot­ing “ratio­nal­ly” means vot­ing for the inter­ests of the class that gets the vote? What about the uses of pro­pa­gan­da to cul­ti­vate offi­cial state ide­ol­o­gy in the pop­u­lace (as Wal­ter Lipp­man so well described in Pub­lic Opin­ion). And what are we to do with the deep sus­pi­cions of, say, Niet­zsche when it comes to Socrat­ic ideas of rea­son, many of which have been con­firmed by the find­ings of neu­ro­science?

As cog­ni­tive sci­en­tist and lin­guist George Lakoff writes, “Most thought is uncon­scious, since we don’t have con­scious access to our neur­al cir­cuit­ry.… Esti­mates by neu­ro­sci­en­tists vary between a gen­er­al ‘most’ to as much as 98%, with con­scious­ness as the tip of the men­tal ice­berg.” That is to say that—despite our lev­els of edu­ca­tion and spe­cial­ized training—we “tend to make deci­sions uncon­scious­ly,” at the gut lev­el, “before becom­ing con­scious­ly aware of them.” Even deci­sions like vot­ing.

These con­sid­er­a­tions should also inform cri­tiques of democ­ra­cy, which have not only warned us of its dan­gers, but have also been used to jus­ti­fy wide­spread vot­er sup­pres­sion and dis­en­fran­chise­ment for rea­sons that have noth­ing to do with objec­tive ratio­nal­i­ty and every­thing to do with myth and polit­i­cal ide­ol­o­gy.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Socrates on TV, Cour­tesy of Alain de Bot­ton (2000)

Watch Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tions to 25 Philoso­phers by The School of Life: From Pla­to to Kant and Fou­cault

How to Know if Your Coun­try Is Head­ing Toward Despo­tism: An Edu­ca­tion­al Film from 1946

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness