Democratic Distractions

We were taught that democracy is sacred, that voting sets us free. But if we’re honest, we must confront a dangerous myth: the belief that the ballot is the great equalizer between peasant and president.

What if democracy was never meant to liberate us, only to include us long enough to pacify resistance? What if the ballot box is not a tool of freedom, but a ritual of submission, a mechanism that numbs us to the reality of aristocratic rule?

Aristocracy is inherited or protected power, passed through bloodlines, elite institutions, old networks, or captured infrastructure. And while aristocrats are not always cash-rich, they are always powerful. They maintain control in a variety of ways through land, law, legacy, and ideological dominance. Their true wealth lies in access, impunity, and the ability to manipulate what the public believes is “just” or “inevitable.”

They preserve this dominance through adaptation, by absorbing new elites into their fold and by dressing oppression in the language of legitimacy, often sold as democracy.