"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, and that public opinion expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters."
― Winston Churchill
"The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject."
― Marcus Aurelius
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
― Lord Acton
If it is true that power corrupts, then it follows that placing power in the hands of the entire populace will cause the entire populace to become corrupted.
― Me
Majorities can choose evil. They have done so, are doing so, and likely will continue to do so in the future. Humans, whether pursuing selfish interests of misguided notions of doing what's best for everyone, often choose actions that result in harm, whether by design or as an unintended consequence. That's true whether we're talking about one, lone dictator or a mob of millions of them. Political philosophers over the ages have argued over whether it's more moral to entrust power to the ignorant masses or to an elite few (or one) who are seen as being best qualified to rule. I contend that neither of these options addresses the fact that neither of them prevent whomever is eventually appointed from committing evil. If a government is engaged in ethnic cleansing, it makes little difference whether the public voted on it or whether it was the idea of a popular autocrat.
Once the capacity to commit evil is mitigated, then we can dissect the finer points of how power should be distributed, but I consider that question to be irrelevant until we first deal with the a government's capacity to do evil. That should be our priority. Whether we're to have an emperor or a senate or direct vote by every citizen, we must have a system for safeguarding the innocent.
To that end, the founders of the United States wrote the Constitution, devising a system of checks and balances so that no one person or group of people would have an undue amount of power. And then, as an afterthought, they added the Bill of Rights, to drive home the point that the government was not to be in the business of molesting the people. It was a nobly conceived, but impossible task. A machine is only as good as its weakest part, and a machine meant to thwart evil is bound to fail if it's made entirely of people who are all free to choose evil. There's no point having multiple branches of government to keep each other in check if they're all in cahoots. That's just a good ol' boy system with extra steps. Telling a bunch of politicians to keep an eye on each other is like telling a bunch of nine-year olds to babysit each other. It doesn't work.
But of course we have to put people in these leadership roles. What alternative is there? Computers? Someone has to program the computer and tell it what the parameters are, what principles to hold sacrosanct and how priorities should be ranked. If we leave that to AI, there's no telling what sort of glitchy nonsense it might come up with. Without the capability for a human override, we're entrusting our fate to something that thinks people should have seven-fingered hands. With it, we're back to just trusting people to make the right choices.
I'm sorry, I don't have a solution to this dilemma. I don't know that there is one. But if we're to govern wisely, we must at least be mindful that this dilemma exists. There is no form of government--not even democracy--that completely prevents the possibility of a government doing evil.
