Comment by MengerSponge
Comment by MengerSponge 10 months ago
Democracy is 200? You're off by a full order of magnitude.
Progress isn't inevitable. It's possible for knowledge to be lost and for civilization to regress.
Comment by MengerSponge 10 months ago
Democracy is 200? You're off by a full order of magnitude.
Progress isn't inevitable. It's possible for knowledge to be lost and for civilization to regress.
Okay. You're right about what I wrote. Let me rephrase what I meant. I was missing the words "the widespread adoption of"
Athens had a democracy over 2500 years ago. A few Native American tribes had long-lasting democracies. Ukrainian cities were democratically self-governing 500 years ago, and Poland had elected kings.
Those were isolated examples. This was not a revolution. We also haven't regressed; isolated examples continued throughout history. If you point to a year, you can probably find some democracy somewhere. The only major regression I know in history was around 1000BC. Regressions are rare.
What changed was a revolution. From just before 1800 to just a little after 1900, virtually every country had a revolution which led to either being some form of democracy, or pretending to be one. Democracy was no longer isolated. We had the creation of a free world covering much of the world's population, and the creation of what was pretending to be a democracy (today, even the Democratic People's Republic of Korea pretends to be a democracy).
The number of countries which claim to not be a democracy, you can count on your fingers. Iran. Vatican City. Saudi Arabia. UAE. Oman. Eswanti. Did I miss any?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_system_of...