In the classical model, women, children, young adults, slaves, travelers and other 2nd tier denizens were blessed with the immediate acquaintance in their own social circle of a privileged entity, the fabled adult male. Absent this, they were pretty much SOL.

Adult males congregated in their own social clubs, of varying description and complexity. Men in charge of large households had perhaps direct access to a Senator. Men of lesser proeminence has perhaps mediated access to a Senator, through their priest, or head tradesman in their trade, or political relations and so on. Then the Senators would get together, and work out the distilled voices that had filtered to their ears into some sort of convention for the land, have it carved on a rock and be done with it.

This system leverages a large number of fundamental human behaviours, such as the very universal tendency of people to tell another their troubles, and the particular workings of memory, and the strictures of speech and language and the ancient institution of the gift and of hospitality and on it goes. This system also leverages a number of convenient bits of math. To understand, let's do some. Take the average notable man, who has on average two women, one slightly older with five surviving children, the other slightly younger with three. That is so far ten people. He further has five apprentices in his shop, two of which are married, so seventeen. He has three house servants, which are old (and perhaps the younger woman started as a fourth, as oft is the case), two of which care for their parentless grandchildren : two one, one the other. Twenty-three. He has maybe a dozen client relatives, younger brothers, cousins, what have you. Thirty five. There's still room in the Dunbar number and so we may well consider our man average.

People above him socially, such as for instance the guildmaster of his craft, the priest in charge of some local temple, the owner of a significant bit of real estate and so on probably would maintain relations with a hundred or two such men, which extends their second tier reach to a good three to five thousand individuals, in all walks of life. A congregation of a hundred or two such men can reasonably interact with one Senator, and so a Senate in session can maximally represent say 5`000 souls * 100 per Senator * 100 Senators = 50 million people! And this representation would be factual, rather than statutory : the murmurs of each woman and child heard in the Senate through the filtering of a voice four steps removed, but heard nevertheless.

This system has one major flaw : it only works among the naive. Once people start thinking in meta-terms, (something that's called genre savvy when discussing literary characters) the whole shebang's trivially hackable, and in so many ways mere enumeration is an impossible task.

The first result of that unfortunate circumstance is a shortening of the strings. If back in the days of darkness you could trivially find five-jointed proteins, taking word from a woman to her husband to his boss to his Senator to the Senate (and generally expect this to work, even), under the merciless gaze of the ultraviolet star above you'd be much surprised if three joints do anything. So the hierarchy flattens, the franchise is expanded "to everyone" - even those cursorily unqualified or incapable to exercise it - and yet generally you can't even trust your Senator to carry your voice past the bathroom, in spite of this "direct" contact.

Sadly each node lost means a huge decrease in coverage : if you go from five to four you also go from representing a maximal 50 million to representing a maximal half million - a 99% loss of coverage corresponds to a 20% node loss. This was the exact failure mode of the Greek state : as rhetorics challenges the naivite of the population, rendering more and more (especially younger) men genre savvy, the links shorten and so the maximal size of a state that can be supported drops significantly. There's a good reason Constantinople could rule over millions at a point those millions were clueless, but by and by ended up in charge of five villages swimming among pastures within the immensity of its ancient walls, proportionately to the increased refinement of the villagers in question.

Long story short :

representative democracy worked fine five to two millenia ago, back in a time when people were doing it without knowing that's what they're doing - much in the way Monsieur Jourdain speaks just fine for as long as nobody's told him that's prose.

the only way representative democracy may work is with limited franchise and complex social hierarchy.

while it is perhaps the case that genre savvy people may nevertheless deliberately choose to live in a civilised world rather than starting fires in their own beard, so to speak, it is certainly the case that what currently passes for "democratic" is the exact opposite and also the exact bane of any sort of functional democracy.

This would also be why I don't think so very much of the libertards, and why I find myself so often in contradiction with people who view them as either powerful or in any sense a threat (usually both) : they aren't, either, nor could they really be, either, because the only tool they know actually works for them only a short distance of its run, and for us the entire length of that same run. The libertard's gambit is essentially the position of the Catholic church, hoping that it may teach people to read and write in such a way that they'll actually continue to take the "Holy Scripture" seriously. Why would they ? They won't, they don't, it's just not how that works.

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