The Greeks have taken over China!

According to reports, Xi Jinping told President Biden over the phone that the globe was heading inexorably toward autocracy and that he needed to get in step with it.

Xi says the world is changing extremely fast, and a democracy that requires the consent of the people for every policy change moves too slowly to keep up with the changes.

Mr. Jinping is right, democracies are melting rapidly away to autocracies, but not for the reason he says. The world is headed for autocracy because it has entered into a second Dark Age, whereby the U.S. and its allies are engaging so completely in the pleasures of the present, that we have abandoned our former level of literacy and lost touch with the past.

Mr. Jinping’s argument is what the ancient Greeks would call “sophistry,” or crazy reasoning. Our world is approaching the level of impossible to deal with for exactly the opposite reason Xi says. It is overwhelming us because government run by an elite few can’t solve problems expeditiously and humanely no matter how much power the chief executive has.

Democracy has a low-tech solution that has worked for the 5,500 years of recorded history to solve problems. It allows people to quickly solve problems locally, and allows solutions to vary widely from area to area as long as things are decided democratically. A government that tries to force one solution down the throats of several hundreds of millions of people often makes gross mistakes, and displeases most of the people most of the time.

Democracy pleases most of the people most of the time. Which system would you rather live under?