The Book of the Shadows

Slowly, the most powerful and important democracy in history is turning from the power and influence of the people in general to the power and influence of a select few – from a real democracy into an oligarchy.

As a political scientist I don’t really find any form of government necessarily boring. In fact I’m probably a bit unconventional in my approach to the viability of various forms of government. But as I began working on my creative writing hobby, I realized a few things that are retrospectively simply obvious. First, most fiction stories of note take place in worlds with non-democratic governments. Second, democracy is boring. The second point reinforces the first. That is, the boringness of democratic governance leads to the writers of fiction stories to instead pursue more interesting governmental systems, thus using a government that isn’t a democracy, or at the very least only vaguely resembles a democracy. Democracy is driven by the most boring endeavor in the history of mankind – bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is the system by which operations are set to happen. In the abstract, everyone hates it and tends to say they can’t understand it. But it’s a simple concept. It ...