Rational Ghosts: Why Democracy Fails

This extended segment on the essay titled "Rational Ghosts – Why Enlightenment Democracy Was Built to Fail" by independent researcher Bry Willis, presents a structural critique of modern democratic systems. The author argues that democracy is inherently flawed because its Enlightenment blueprint assumed citizens were perfectly rational and consistent, a premise contradicted by evidence. Willis leverages three primary areas to demonstrate this mismatch: psychology, which shows voters are biased and tribal; mathematics, citing Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem to prove preference aggregation is incoherent; and sociology, using Dunbar’s number to highlight the impossibility of scale in national solidarity. The essay asserts that democratic stability over the past two centuries was merely contingent upon temporary factors like economic prosperity and external threats, which are now collapsing, revealing the system's fragility and structural mismatch. Finally, the author suggests alternatives like subsidiarity, deliberative democracy, and sortition that accommodate actual human cognitive limits rather than denying them. - https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17250225- https://philosophics.blog/2025/10/02/rational-ghosts-why-enlightenment-democracy-was-built-to-fail/