We take democracy for granted. We think it is the normal way of government. But it isn't. We should be extremely grateful to be living in a democracy. Dictatorship has always been the normal form of government. Many countries in the world are still dictatorships, and no one is waiting in line to go live in them.

Once every several thousand years, an invention comes along that allows a quantum leap for humanity. One such invention was agriculture. It freed us from the shackles of foraging for food, and within ten thousand years, the human population on earth jumped from about 10 million to over 6 billion!

When the population density of a species increases, violence increases. In order to prevent the rapidly expanding human population from eradicating itself, our ancestors developed CIVILIZATION, which is highlighted by LIVING BY LAWS. This has worked remarkably well, but has nevertheless left us with an undesirable level of violence in the form of WAR between nations.

The solution to this problem is DEMOCRACY. Democracy is the single most significant social advance in the history of civilization. Democracy enables phenomenal prosperity while eliminating warfare between nations that practice it.

Why don't democracies wage war with each other? Read on.

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The fundamental difference between dictatorship and democracy is this: In dictatorships, people's actions represent the will of the leader. In democracy, the leaders' actions represent the will of the people. In other words, in dictatorship, if we don't make our LEADERS happy, they kill us. In a democracy, if our leaders don't make US happy, we vote them out of office.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DICTATORSHIP

When we live in dictatorship, it's child's play for our leaders to fool us. They incessantly bombard us with stories of their heroism and virtue. Since none of us want to die, we don't dispute these stories.

Not wanting us to realize they are the true cause of our miserable standard of living, our leaders have the media inform us that our suffering is due to some evil group or nation taking advantage of us. Our religious leaders glorify our rulers and preach hatred against this enemy group or nation because clergymen, too, want to live.

Our leaders can declare war in a blink since it doesn't matter what we think. They give us a choice between immediate certain death at home or possible survival on the battlefront, and we choose the battlefront.

Convinced that our "enemies" deserve to die, we eagerly stage demonstrations against them. We never hold demonstrations against our own leaders. Residents of democracies see our unanimous support for our leaders and often take it to be a sign of how correct our cause must be. But there are two real reasons for this monolithic support: 1) we don't want our leaders to kill us, and 2) we live without freedom of speech, so we have no way of knowing that our leaders are lying to us. We can't even IMAGINE that there's anything about our leadership to protest.

Sometimes our leaders hold "elections." We are asked to choose between our leaders or death. Our leaders win hands down.

But democracies have freedom of speech and their citizens are permitted to develop and maintain contrary opinions. Dictators can use this to neutralize the power of the democracies. Since the dictatorships really ARE weaker than their democratic foes, it is easy for them to present themselves as innocent victims and gain the sympathy of the democratic opponent's citizens. Since those citizens want to avoid war, an internal struggle arises between those who support the war and those who oppose it. This can immobilize the government. To make matters more difficult, other democracies may take the side of the dictatorship because they, too, have sympathy for the weaker side. These processes weakens the democracy and embolden the dictatorship.

But dictatorship and democracy aren't "different but equal." With all its faults, democracy is incomparably better than dictatorship, both for the individual and the nation as a whole.

Like a man selling a diamond for peanuts at a garage sale because he thought it was cubic zirconium, we may lose democracy because we fail to appreciate it's incredible superiority to dictatorship. Millions of who enjoy the benefits of life under democracy give their support to cruel dictators because they see them as the victims of their powerful democratic opponents. Unfortunately, as weapons become more deadly, we may one day all be wiped out because the democracies of the world neutralized each other when faced with some megalomaniac dictator.

A dictator would never feel emboldened enough to challenge a powerful democracy if he could not count on the internal dissent within democracy. But democracies will never completely unite as long as they don't see the difference between themselves and dictatorship. For the sake of the future of civilization, the citizens of democracies need to be educated about this difference. And if we are really to live by the Golden Rule, we should all be fighting for the right of the residents of dictatorships to enjoy the freedoms we have under democracy.

With modern technology, a billion dollars can go a very long way in spreading education about democracy. Who in their right mind would conclude that dictatorship is better than democracy once the diffences are pointed out to them?In the first stage, efforts need be directed only towards education within the democratic countries. Once the democracies are united in their appreciation of democracy, the dictatorships can then be targeted. Most residents of dictatorships would eagerly embrace democracy once the advantages are clearly explained to them. Since most dictatorships are ultimately dependent upon the economies of the world's democracies for their wealth and power, it wouldn't be hard for a unified democratic world to use economic sanctions to force dictators to allow a peaceful transition to democratic rule.