How did the first democracy die?

This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Chili Pad.

Will my kids sleep tonight?

Will I wake up at 3 a.m.

again?

Am I going to wake up hot and sweaty because my partner leaves the heat on?

Those are thoughts that bounce around my head when I can't sleep too.

And let's face it, sleep slips away when you're too hot, uncomfortable, or caught in a loop of racing thoughts.

But cool sleep helps reset the body and calm the mind.

That's where ChiliPad by SleepMe comes in.

It's a bed cooling system that personalizes your sleep environment so you'll fall asleep faster, stay asleep longer, and actually wake up refreshed.

I struggle with sleep constantly, and I have found that having a bed that is cool and temperature controlled actually really does make a huge difference.

ChiliPad works with your current mattress and uses water to regulate the temperature.

Visit www.sleepme slash search to get your ChiliPad and save 20% with code search.

This limited offer is available for search engine listeners and only for a limited time.

Order it today with free shipping and try it out for 30 days.

You return it for free if you don't like it with their sleep trial.

Visit www.sleep, S-L-E-E-P dot me slash search and see why cold sleep is your ultimate ally in performance and recovery.

This episode is brought to you in part by Viore.

A new perspective on performance apparel, perfect if you're sick and tired of traditional old workout gear.

Viori clothes are incredibly versatile and comfortable, perfect for whatever your day brings.

They're designed to look great beyond the gym, whether you're running errands, heading to the office, or meeting up with your friends.

One specific Viore item I would recommend is the core short.

This is a short that started it all for Viore.

It is one short for every sport,

for whatever sports you play.

It's ideal for fitness, running, and training, but also genuinely stylish and comfortable enough to just wear all day.

Viori is an investment in your happiness.

For search engine listeners, they are offering 20% off your first purchase.

Get yourself some of the most comfortable and versatile clothing on the planet at viore.com slash pjsearch.

That's vuori.com slash pjsearch.

Exclusions apply.

Visit the website for full terms and conditions.

Not only will you receive 20% off your first purchase, but enjoy free shipping on any U.S.

orders over 75 bucks and free returns.

Go to Viori.com slash PJsearch and discover the versatility of Viori clothing.

Exclusions apply.

Visit the website for full terms and conditions.

Welcome to Search Engine.

I'm PJ Vote.

No question too big, no question too small, no question too old.

We're going to do something different this week.

How often do you think about the Roman Empire?

How often do I think about the Roman Empire?

Yeah.

Maybe three or four times a month.

A few times a week, I'd say.

Last fall, this meme circulated where people, mostly women on TikTok, asked their husbands or boyfriends how often they thought about the Roman Empire.

Why do you think about the Roman Empire?

It's a very interesting time.

Don't think so.

Well, you never think about it.

What do you think about them?

Not the Roman Empire.

It was a moment where once again, we learned there are two kinds of people.

This time, those who think about Rome all the time and those who do not.

But there was a third type of guy, never mentioned in this meme, and that guy was me.

I don't think about the Romans much, but I do think about ancient Greece a fair amount of the time.

Specifically, I think about ancient Greece as a coping mechanism.

When I get deeply upset about our democracy, I think about theirs.

Athens was the very first democracy in human history, one that faced some of the same problems we face, some problems of their own, and then died in spectacular fashion.

I know this might not be the escapism some people are looking for this week, but walk with me for a sec.

Any book can be a self-help book.

And for the past few years, mine has been What's Wrong with Democracy?

From Athenian Practice to American Worship, which is a factual academic look at the problems of Athenian democracy in the 5th century BC.

I spoke to its writer this week.

Okay, first things first, can you just introduce yourself?

Sure.

My name's Lauren Salmons, but everyone calls me Jay.

And I teach Greek history and Greek and Latin at Boston University and have done so for over 30 years.

I also work for the American College of Greece in a consulting role in Athens.

And my interests have been democracy and imperialism and the historians who write about democracy and imperialism for pretty much my whole career.

One of the ancient historians who Jay thinks about most often is a Greek writer named Thucydides.

Jay first encountered his work decades ago as a student.

When I got to graduate school, I still thought I was going to be be a Roman historian, but it was really Thucydides that dragged me into Athenian history.

I found him so interesting that I abandoned my Roman studies and focused on the Greeks.

And what was it about Thucydides?

Like, what about the way that he wrote?

He was so dark.

I mean, Thucydides has an extremely dark view of human nature.

He's very much like my father in many ways.

If you think things are as bad as they can possibly get, you're definitely wrong.

They're going to get worse.

But I think sometimes people think Thucydides is sort of taking joy in that, that he's saying, well, it's good that human beings exercise power in this really sort of awful way.

But I think that's wrong.

He's someone who recognizes the tragedy of the fact that human beings tend to make similar mistakes over and over again.

Thucydides was an elite in Greek society, a general who was exiled from Athens after losing a big battle.

He ended up spending time in enemy land, the only place he was welcome for much of his life.

Exile is hard on people, but it can be useful for writers, and Thucydides took the opportunity to try to understand Athenian society from his new position outside of it.

A lot of what Thucydides wrote, you could be forgiven for thinking was about us today.

Complaining about Athens, his hometown around 400 BC, he observed that, quote, most people, in fact, will not take the trouble in finding out the truth, but are much more inclined to accept the first story they hear.

Huh.

Of course, one of the most famous things Thucydides said is, as long as human nature remains the same, similar things will happen again.

And that's why he believed his work would be useful for those who want to know about the future.

Not because history is cyclical, not because history repeats itself, but because human beings repeat themselves and make the same kinds of mistakes generation after generation.

So, Thucydides is going to be our primary source for this story.

And he really was there.

He watched the first democracy rise and fall.

Chapter 1.

Athens

When the story begins around 650 BC, Greece is a series of city-states.

Athens was a typical one.

The city itself, very small, maybe 10 or 20,000 people live there.

On the top of the big hill, there's a few temples, some spots for public gatherings.

Most people live down below.

Eventually, they'll build a city wall.

Outside the city, miles and miles of rural farmland where the majority lived.

And then if you keep traveling further, throughout the Mediterranean, there's something like a thousand other city-states that looked more or less like Athens did.

These city-states are independently ruled and constantly at war with each other.

And like our American states, they're a series of experiments, each representing a different way society could function.

Spartans lived in a country with more women's rights, but also lived under military rule.

Corinthians knew their state was the wealthy commercial hub, but that it was run by oligarchic elites.

Athens, when our story begins, is not yet known as the home of Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle, as the cradle of Western philosophy and government.

Athens is known instead as kind of a backwater.

Athens was a second-tier state, maybe even a third-tier state in the seventh and sixth centuries BC.

And what does that mean?

Like, what is a third-tier state at that time?

Well, I mean that they, A, they weren't as powerful powerful as some other states.

Their military strength was not up to some other states.

But what I really mean is that they didn't have the early history that other states had.

Like Sparta and Thebes and Argos.

Those are names that ring through mythology and what the Greeks thought of their very ancient past.

Whereas Athens, for example, if you take Homer, the Iliad, Athens plays almost no role at all in the Iliad.

And most classicists can't even name the Athenian hero of the Iliad because he's a nobody in the story.

He appears four times and twice twice he's being called a coward.

But they do know that Odysseus comes from Ithaca and Ajax comes from Salamis.

So you have all these other heroes that come from other places that seem far less important than Athens.

But to an Athenian reading Homer, he fails to find himself there.

So what does this mean for the Athenian psyche?

And I think it's actually a major factor in how the Athenians thought of themselves.

You mean that they had like what I'm from Philadelphia, like they had what Philadelphians have, which is like this feeling of like sort of being sandwiched between places that thought of themselves as greater, like this sort of angry, overlooked feeling.

Yeah.

Yeah, I do, I do think that.

That's probably making it too strong.

Yeah.

I think that this feeling rarely rises to a kind of conscious level, but it's active.

It does rise to a conscious level.

For example, Pericles, in one of the speeches that Thucydides records, says, we don't need any Homer to sing our praises.

That's a really odd thing to say.

We don't need any Homer.

We know we're not there, and we don't need him.

We're going to write our own epic.

This nation that wanted to write its own epic, it had a plan.

Chapter 2, the Athenian Experiment.

Athens' plan to make a name for itself involved constantly picking fights with its neighbors.

The Athenians were obsessed with imperialism.

That's how they believed they'd get into the history books as a conquering power.

That's their goal.

But in the 5th century BC, they happened to make what will turn out to be a very consequential choice for human history.

They offer widespread voting.

There were some other Greek city-states that allowed voting, but it was restricted to small groups of elites, aristocrats, property owners.

In Athens, the politicians start allowing more and more regular people to vote.

And this is one of the things that makes Athenian democracy different.

It starts to look different from other Greek city-states because the Athenians lowered the property qualification to the point eventually you don't have to own property to be a citizen and vote in the

This was an extraordinarily radical idea.

Of course, there were big groups excluded, women, foreigners, enslaved people.

But by the standards of the time, letting the masses vote was unheard of.

And what's most interesting is that Athenian voting looks completely different from the voting we do today in America.

Like to them, the idea of an election day where we all show up and pick the politician who will represent us and then get a little sticker afterwards, the Athenians would have found this comical.

In Athens, what would happen instead was much more exciting.

The Athenians had a stone machine called a claritarion, which it's sort of hard to picture, but you could just imagine instead if you want the random ball jumbler from a bingo hall.

The claritarion helped randomly assign random citizens to the Athenian version of Congress.

There, they would serve for a year.

You didn't vote for your congressman.

You became one at random and then got to put forth laws which any other citizen could vote on.

If this sounds crazy, it has an upside.

The lottery system, sortition, prevents the thing we have, a system where we get to vote for our politicians, but those politicians are usually elites and wealthy people use their money to influence that vote.

Another Greek writer, Aristotle, foresaw this problem over 2,000 years ago.

Aristotle said, you can't define democracy by voting in elections because if you have voting in elections, you're going to have rule of the rich.

Aristotle said this necessarily follows from elections that you'll end up with rule of the rich.

They saw it that early.

Yeah, isn't that amazing?

I mean, that's obviously not true.

I mean,

clearly, Aristotle got it wrong.

This is something Jay clearly relishes about the Athenians.

how their dark view of human nature meant that in some ways they could predict problems with democracy that we encounter as surprises.

I had my own moment where I felt a shock of recognition hearing about a different part of Athenian democracy.

It had to do with how they ran their justice system.

So I should say I first found Jay's book in 2021, which meant I was reading it during a very unique moment in American life.

People were angry about society, and that anger was roiling on social media.

At the time, it felt like every week there were these impromptu public events, some trial by internet, these speedy affairs where some schmo was paraded out, almost always found guilty, and then usually ostracized, sometimes permanently, sometimes just temporarily.

I witnessed a lot of these events as a spectator.

I even reported on a few, and then one day, I found myself inside of one as the Shmo.

The main thing I was struck by was how uniquely modern it felt.

Even when I tried to write about it, it felt too modern to describe.

There were no words, or all the words were wrong.

Reading Jay's book, I realized this was not as modern as I had believed.

What I thought was an unprecedented system of justice was in fact a very precedented system of justice.

Chapter 3.

The people decide.

So just help me picture, like, I'm accused of a crime in ancient Greece.

What does my trial look like in Athens?

Well, it's going to be heard by a jury, a large jury of Athenians.

Okay.

You're going to have to defend yourself.

There's no lawyer to defend you.

You can hire someone to write a speech for you, but you're still going to have to deliver that speech yourself.

And am I delivering that speech in like, I'm assuming I'm not in a mahogany courtroom.

Nope.

Where am I?

They're outdoors.

The Athenian courts were typically outdoors.

Jurors sitting on benches around you.

No microphones, no amplification, no nothing.

The whole trial is going to happen in one day.

Prosecution will make its case.

The prosecutor will also not be a public prosecutor.

It'll be an individual Athenian citizen who has the ability to bring this case against you.

And you're going to defend yourself and the whole thing will be over in a day.

The jurors will vote whether you're guilty or not.

And if they find you guilty, then they're going to vote on what punishment you're going to get.

And how many people are sitting on my jury in a trial?

500, 1,000, sometimes more than that.

So I am pleading my case in front of 500 to 1,000 people.

Am I screaming the whole time?

I hope so.

If you want to be heard,

if you've got any chance.

And you need to think about entertaining the jury, too.

Right.

You've got to hold people's attention.

It's just like public speaking anywhere else.

You know, you may have all the evidence in the world, but if you can't hold their attention, or if they just don't like you, I mean, let's just say they jurors don't like you.

They've been looking for a chance to get rid of you, right?

And there's no mechanism for making sure that only evidence is used here.

One of the practices the Athenians engaged in that I found very...

fascinating was that they had a formal system of ostracism.

Can you just describe for me how that worked?

Sure.

Once Once a year, the Athenians would get together and vote on the question, are we going to ostracize anybody this year?

Ostracism would mean sending somebody away for 10 years.

Their property wasn't seized.

Nothing was done to them.

They were just sent away.

So there's no right to property that prevents the Athenian people from doing this.

The Athenian people can do what they want.

It is, in fact, a direct democracy.

So of course, I always tell my students, I'm definitely voting yes, you know, every year.

Are we going to have an ostracism?

Yes.

I don't know who we're going to ostracize, but I don't want to miss the chance of having an ostracism.

That's pretty great.

So, and then a few days later, they would come back and they would have the actual vote.

And the day of the vote, you would write the name of the person you wanted to ostracize on a broken piece of pottery.

That pottery is called an ostracon, so that's what gives ostracism its name.

And so you wrote the name of the person you wanted to ostracize, you know, Professor Salmons.

And then you turn that in.

And if 6,000 people voted, then whoever got the most votes had to go.

No matter what.

No matter what.

There's no appeal.

There's nothing you can, you can say, well, they just don't like me.

You know, they have a bias against people from Arkansas like me, you know, and they're throwing me out.

There's no appeal to this.

You have to go.

And

why?

Like, at what point did they realize our society will function better if once a year we can take the human desire to cast some of ours out and formalize it?

Right.

So this looks pretty clearly to have been something they invented right after the Persian Wars and in the context where Athens had gotten rid of its tyrants, but the the Persians had tried to bring a tyrant back and impose a tyrant on Athens, a previous tyrant.

And the first people who were ostracized were people who could be associated in some way with the tyrants.

So it looks like the Athenians thought to prevent a potential tyrant, we will use this thing, ostracism, right?

We can't trust having this guy around even, so we're going to get rid of him.

But it turns into something else.

I think we both know where this is going.

But before it does, it is only fair to acknowledge that the mob was not always wrong.

Athenians used ostracism to remove some very dangerous tyrants, people who may have broken no laws, but who did threaten society.

The mob also, I mean, this one's just funny, they ostracized Aristides the just, in part because they were so irritated by his nickname, which, to be fair, does sound a little bit like virtue signaling.

Over time, as you'd expect, Elites began just casting each other out of society for all sorts of reasons.

Some fair, some not.

not.

Athenian democracy was not concerned, as we sometimes are, with due process.

It was concerned strictly with amplifying the voice of the people.

And today, we question some of the Athenian people's choices.

Like when they tried, convicted, and executed Socrates.

Socrates, perhaps the greatest philosopher in the history of the West, found guilty of being insufficiently pious, of corrupting the youth with his strange ideas.

In Socrates' case, we're told that more people voted that he should be executed than found him guilty.

So there were people who voted for Socrates' innocence who still voted that he should be executed.

And why?

Why in Socrates' case, he had annoyed a whole lot of people, including some very powerful people.

This is part of what's so confusing about how to think about the first democracy.

The Athenians gave us Socrates.

They also killed him.

And every democracy since has had to wrestle with this moment.

This moment where the people got exactly what they wanted.

And how much were the American founders thinking about Athenian democracy when they designed our democracy?

Oh, they thought about it, but they didn't see it as a positive example.

Almost everything they said about it was, we want to avoid that.

The founders just didn't want the American system to be that open to the will of the people.

The will of the people had to be controlled to some degree.

It had to be blunted, you know, the force of the will of the people.

James Madison, one of our founders wrote that had every athenian citizen been a socrates every athenian assembly would still have been a mob

and in athens unlike in america the leaders really learned to fear the people generals who lost wars wars that people had voted for were sometimes executed often exiled Sometimes the people would ostracize a general, then a few years later, realize they wanted him back and have to hit undo.

It was a raucous, I would suggest insane insane way to run a city-state.

And over time, the leaders who would learn to thrive in a society like this would be the ones who would help destroy it.

After the break, a new word becomes popular in Athens, demagogue.

This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Bombas.

Fall's here, kids are back in school, vacations are over, it is officially the start of cozy season, which means it's time to slide into some bombas.

You know bombas, the most comfortable socks, slippers, tees, and underwear out there, made from premium materials that actually make sense for this time of year.

The season's softest materials, think merino wool that keeps you warm when it's chilly, but cool when it's hot.

Sapima cotton that's softer, stronger, and more breathable than regular cotton.

And even rag wool, the thick, durable, classic cozy sock you'll want all fall.

The best part, For every item you buy, Bombus donates one to someone experiencing homelessness.

Over 150 million items have been donated thanks to customers.

I mostly just wear Bombus socks.

I've been only wearing red socks because it's harder for people to steal them from me.

But I've decided this year, I'm switching to purple.

You can head over to bombus.com/slash engine and use code engine for 20% off your first purchase.

That's bombbas.com/slash engine.

Code Engine at checkout.

This episode is brought to you in part by Green Light.

You know, as kids get older, some parts of parenting start to get easier, like finally having real conversations, them grabbing their own snacks, and on a really good day, like a really good day, even cleaning up after themselves.

But one thing that never really gets easier is teaching kids about money.

We have had a lot of luck in our household using Green Light.

Green Light is a debit card and money app made just for families.

Parents can send money to their kids, monitor spending and saving, and kids get hands-on experience building confidence and lifelong financial skills.

Greenlight makes learning about money fun with games that teach saving, investing, and smart spending.

Plus, Greenlight has a chores feature where you can set up one-time for recurring chores and reward kids with allowances automatically.

Maybe that's why millions of parents and kids trust Greenlight, the number one family finance and safety app.

Don't wait to teach teach your kids real-world money skills.

Start your risk-free Green Light trial today at greenlight.com slash search.

That's greenlight.com/slash search to get started.

Greenlight.com/slash search.

Welcome back to the show.

Chapter 4, Greek Tragedy When our story began, Athens had been a third-tier city-state, a backwater.

But by the middle of the 5th century BC, that had changed.

They defeated the Persians while fighting alongside the Spartans.

They dominated islands like Noxos, Ahina, Evia.

Throughout the Aegean, all these cities are paying tribute back to Athens.

Things look good.

The threat to Athenian democracy when it arrives, it won't come from one of Athens' neighbors.

It'll come from its people.

One of the early ideas in Athenian democracy had been that all these random people who are being pulled off their farms and into public service, they should get paid.

A good idea, which

spun into something else.

One of the things is that the pay for public service in the fifth century became eventually pay for all kinds of things, including in the fourth century, they paid themselves to vote.

They're paying themselves to vote?

Like a lot?

Well, no, not a lot.

What you would get paid as a laborer for one day, something like that.

It's funny, I have to say, on first blush, the idea of paying people to vote does not seem so bad to me.

It would mean more people voted, maybe more working people voted.

But what happened in Athens is that the demagogues realized offering to pay people to do things was a very good way to buy public support.

Eventually, they got to the point where they paid themselves to go to the theater.

So that they subvented, they underwrote theater tickets for Athenians.

And why were they making, those are terrible decisions?

Well, I mean, how do you, if you're in an assembly and a politician gets up and says, I think you guys should be paid to vote, who's going to vote against that?

Right.

I mean, once that idea is out there, once the idea of paying people to do X or Y is out there, it's just impossible, it seems to me, in a democratic environment to get people to go, no, no, I'll give up that money.

I don't want to be paid.

No, I don't want to get that extra benefit.

So with the crowd voting for what the crowd wanted, government spending in 5th century BC Athens starts to go a little cuckoo bananas.

For instance, the tax revenue that was being used to fund the military, some demagogue suggests, why don't we just use that money to fund entertainment instead?

More festivals, more theater, more religious holidays.

The crowd, in its infinite wisdom, agrees, which required politicians to find even more innovative ways to accumulate silver.

They borrowed money from the goddess Athena.

How do you borrow money from a goddess?

Yeah, it's funny.

Athena was very willing to loan.

They saw that money in their treasuries and that was owned by their gods as available for human use.

It wasn't that the money owned by the gods couldn't be used.

So they would, just to make sure I understand, so the state would

mine silver from the mines.

It would have reserve.

Exactly.

Some of those coins would be given as tribute to the gods, but they're not like throwing it down a well where they can't get it.

It's available.

And so then you can borrow from the gods.

Right.

So the Athenians kept those books separate.

The money that was taken out of the mines, that was money that didn't have to be borrowed.

But the money that they borrowed from the gods, some of which they had taken from other Greek states, some of that imperial money gets dedicated to the gods.

So the Athenians were melting down their statues of the gods for gold.

They're also spending the money they'd set aside for the gods to fund endless wars.

That money had to be paid back and had to be paid back at interest.

And Athena was very generous during the Peloponnesian War.

She lowered her interest rate from something like 7% to 1.5%, something like that.

It was nice over.

But the Athenians basically spent all the money they had that they had accumulated through their empire.

And that debt was a debt to the gods, but they never paid it back.

A state, a democratic state, can just spend itself into oblivion.

And in fact, I would go so far to say it will spend itself into oblivion.

So you think in some ways the mistake they made is just like they overspent.

They overspent, and that overspending led to more military action.

Because why?

The empire is generating some of this money that's being used to pay people

and to build the buildings and to pay people to serve on juries.

The Athenians quite well understood that sailing out and attacking other Greeks and imposing tribute payments on them was paying them.

There was a direct relationship between those two things.

They understood that.

So the democratic system of paying for public service and building these buildings is generating empire.

It's not that the Athenians weren't imperial before.

Athens was always aggressive.

Even before democracy, the Athenians had an unusually aggressive profile.

It's part of their national character for some reason.

But boy, democracy really amped it up.

There must have been Athenians who knew that if a state paid everybody to vote, paid everybody to serve on the thousand-seat juries, paid people to go to Athenian Coachella, that eventually the need for silver would force them into a war they would lose.

Thucydides actually describes how the few Athenians who knew also knew to shut up.

He writes, quote, with this enthusiasm of the majority, the few that liked it not feared to appear unpatriotic by holding up their hands against it, and so kept quiet.

At least in the Athenian story, the desire to be democratic led to people voting for wanting more money, essentially, or wanting to be paid to do more things, which necessitated more imperialism, which they didn't have a problem with.

There's no Howard Zinn of Athens.

No.

No, I mean,

there were, by the end of the fifth century, there are Athenians who are saying things like, this imperialism thing is a little out of control.

It's a tiny, tiny voice in a chorus of, but more empire is better.

Chapter 5.

The End

The inevitable finally happens in 338 BC.

The Athenians have voted too many times to pay themselves, not enough times to fund the military that they keep sending off to fight.

Some generals now are even relying on their own private resources to keep things together.

Athens ends up losing a battle finally that it can't bounce back from.

Philip of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great, he is the one to conquer the Athenians at the Battle of Chaeronea.

The Athenians are no longer a sovereign people.

The first democratic experiment in human history is over about 200 years after it had begun.

When we picture the end of our democracy, lately, People talk about fascism, how it's going to be the handmaid's tale or Germany in 1933.

But the end of Athenian democracy wasn't really like that.

In fact, there were plenty of Athenians who were pretty okay with life under the new reign of Philip.

Philip didn't destroy Athens.

The Athenian city-state continued, and the Athenians actually kept having jury trials and they kept electing officials.

They just weren't sovereign anymore.

Athens wasn't running its own show, right?

They got to worry about the Macedonians.

They're not making their own policy anymore.

They're not deciding whether they're going to go to war or not.

Macedon is calling the shots on that, right?

Eventually the Romans are going to call the shots on that.

So that's what changes.

But internally, they still had elections and they still had officers, right?

They still played democracy, we could call it.

That's probably unfair to call it playing.

But they had lost that thing that had defined the Greek city-state before, which is being the absolute sovereign authority over yourself.

You make your own laws, you make your own foreign policy, you decide whether you're going to go to war or not.

Nobody else is going to tell you whether you're going to do that.

They lost that.

Right.

And like the moment where the most important decisions are not the city-state's decision to make, I feel like you don't call that a democracy anymore.

Like you're a place that gets to vote on some things, but you're not, you're not a democracy.

And see, it sounded to me like you were describing the world we live in now,

a place where you get to vote on some stuff.

Yeah.

I mean, I've had this really dark thought over the last few years.

Maybe I have too many of them, but,

you know, Aristotle says man is suited to live in a life in the palace and that the sort of heavy responsibilities of citizenship is the best way for a human being and the ideal way for a human being to spend his public life.

And maybe I still believe that that is true in an ideal world, but it just seems to me that human beings in the end find that too burdensome and that they retreat.

Jay says a strange thing about studying the Athenians as a historian is how much they thought about how they'd be perceived by future historians.

In a weird way, how much they were thinking about him.

America will one day end.

Everything does.

We know there will be some future society that looks back on us, tries to understand the choices we made so that it can better understand itself.

Somewhere, many centuries ahead, there's another Jay, some devoted scholar reaching back to this moment, asking why.

Jay says that he started to fall deeper into Athens when he became more disappointed in the present.

At first, it felt like an escape from the modern politicians he couldn't stand listening to in America.

But more and more, he found himself recognizing us in the Athenians and really seeing the truth in what Thucydides had said, that human nature itself is a constant.

Look, in the late 80s and early 90s, I realized that I had to stop basically watching the news.

Yeah.

And I had to, you know, retreat to some degree into Thucydides and these other authors.

But the problem is that you keep seeing the same things in those authors that you see around you.

So my copy of Thucydides has in the margins of the left, you know, November 1992 written in the margins or something, you know, where I go, this reminded me of something.

It's not that I don't follow the news at all anymore, but I realized I just couldn't become someone who was in that game of what's the next winning move in this political sport.

Jay retreated into Thucydides, and later, I retreated into Jay's work.

Not because I was disappointed in democracy, I was disappointed in the internet.

The same way Athenian democracy naturally created demagogues and over time drove most other people away, I feel like our social media actually worked in a very similar way.

And so for a while, I turned away from the internet.

Honestly, I think I even turned away from society.

But here's a good sentence.

We Greeks believe that a man who takes no part in public affairs is not merely lazy, but good for nothing.

That's Thucydides.

Despite his very dark view of human nature, his faith that people were ultimately ruled by fear, self-interest, and a desire to be seen favorably by their peers,

he still believed we had to show up.

We had to show up to a democracy that would always be vulnerable to demagogues, who would stir up crowds for their own short-term gain.

We had to show up and take our place in a crowd that would often make the wrong choice.

We had to show up despite knowing that real leaders would be rare, and when they did arrive, we might just punish them for their honesty.

We had to show up despite knowing that human nature itself is an incurable condition, that we're likely to make the same mistakes as our ancestors centuries before.

The story of Greek democracy is, appropriately, a tragedy.

A story whose end was inevitable because of the character of the people in it and the setting in which they found themselves.

I understand that not everybody finds a tragedy reassuring, but I do.

It helps me to think that the way we are is not new.

We're always like this, or at least we're always struggling to not be like this.

We go through moments where humans, improbably, organize themselves towards something better, more reasonable.

And then the madness takes over.

And then we begin again.

Is there any part of you that just thinks like, The Athenians had a rough draft number one.

The Romans had rough draft number two.

America might be rough draft number three.

Like, no.

You don't think there's going to be a rough draft number four?

You don't think there should be or what?

Oh, I find this hilarious that people assume that democracy is somehow the ultimate form of government.

And this has been a running shtick of mine for years that you go to any political science department in the West and you won't find somebody who goes, no, the next thing is going to be this really better thing.

It's not democracy at all, right?

Somehow they're all studying ways to make democracy better and ways to make democracy more democratic.

So you're caught in this kind of circle where you evaluate democracy against the principles of democracy.

I don't think that works.

You got to evaluate it by some external standards.

How much justice does it produce?

How much goodness does it produce?

How much wealth does it produce?

How many families does it produce?

There's all kinds of ways you could evaluate it that aren't, how democratic is it?

That thing just won't work, right?

In terms of an evaluation process for me.

So

I really hope.

that we're not just going to keep reinventing democracy over and over and that a human history hasn't ended, you know, with this thing that we're just going to keep tweaking.

Like, isn't it possible that mankind will actually produce a system of government in the future that's superior to democracy?

It's at least possible, I think.

And so if it's possible, we should be thinking about it.

But I still think if we focus too much on that political thing, we take our eyes off the other things that are actually more important.

Right.

It just feels like government is our tool.

If Thucydides felt that human nature was both a constant and had a dark view of it,

then I guess it's easy to think, well, we're not going to change human nature.

And so we just need to keep changing the rules around people to try to guide them towards something better.

Right.

That's true.

But I'll also just add in Thucydides' defense that he did have a dark view of human nature, so do I, but that no historian believes that mankind is completely irredeemable.

Because you would never write about the past if you didn't think a better future was actually possible.

Thucydides had to believe a better future is actually possible.

That's what he says, in fact, early in his history about the future.

He doesn't put it quite in that optimistic a way, but it's implied.

What does he say?

Well, he says that he wants his work to be a possession for all time.

He says, for those who want to know about the future, this work will be valuable because as long as human nature is what it is, similar things will happen again.

And if you know the kinds of things that are likely to happen, you can, in fact, plan for them and you can try to avoid them.

It's not that you're likely to avoid them, but it's possible you may.

And I think, no, I believe this.

This is to me the inherent optimism that goes along with history, even if you have a dark view of human nature.

So I don't believe that it's impossible for better things to happen in the future.

And it's one of the reasons I study the past.

Dr.

Lauren J.

Salmons.

Executive Director of the Institute for Hellenic Culture and the Liberal Arts at the American College of Greece.

His most recent book is called Pericles and the Conquest of History, a political biography.

What's wrong with democracy is harder to find, but if you can find it, it's worth looking.

After a short break, we have an announcement to make.

This episode is brought to you in part by Groons.

If you love the taste of fresh green apples, you're going to want to try Groon's limited edition Groony Smith Apple Gummies, available only through October.

They taste like sweet tart green apple candy, but with all the full body benefits you get from groons.

It's basically fall wrapped up in a gummy.

Groons aren't your typical vitamins.

They're not just a multivitamin, a greens gummy, or a prebiotic.

They're all three and more, all packed into a convenient daily snack pack.

Each pack has six grams of prebiotic fiber.

That's three times the fiber of leading greens powders and the equivalent of more than two cups of broccoli.

Plus, Groon's ingredients are backed by over 35,000 research publications.

They're vegan, gluten-free, nut-free, dairy-free, and come low-sugar or in sugar-free options.

And they taste amazing.

Grab your limited edition Grooney Smith Apple Groons available only through October.

Stock up because they will sell out.

Get up to 52% off.

Use the code Search.

That's at groons.co, G-R-U-N-S.co.

This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Rosetta Stone.

I'm always threatening to learn a new language.

This month, I would like to learn German.

I spent some time among Germans this summer and I found them to be very friendly and I wanted to be able to communicate in their language instead of mine.

The easy way to learn German is Rosetta Stone.

They've been the trusted leader in language learning for over 30 years with 25 different languages to choose from.

Spanish, French, German, Japanese, and more.

What makes Rosetta Stone work is their immersive method.

No clunky English translations, just a natural build from words to phrases to full sentences, so you can actually start thinking in the language.

So don't wait.

Unlock your language learning potential now.

Search Engine listeners can grab Rosetta Stone's lifetime membership for 50% off.

That's unlimited access to 25 language courses for life.

Visit rosettastone.com slash search engine to get started and claim you're 50% off today.

Don't miss out.

Go to rosettastone.com slash search engine and start learning today.

This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Square, the easy way for business owners to take payments, book appointments, manage staff, and keep everything running in one place.

Whether you're selling lattes, cutting hair, detailing cars, or running a design studio, Square helps you run your business without running yourself into the ground.

Square works wherever your customers are, at your counter, your pop-up, online, or even on your phone, all synced in real time.

You can track sales, manage inventory, and get reports from anywhere.

And with instant access to your earnings through Square checking, you're never waiting on your money.

Square even helps you keep your regulars coming back with built-in loyalty and marketing tools.

The hardware looks polished, the software is intuitive, and you can start running smoothly right away.

With Square, you get all the tools to run your business with none of the contracts or complexity.

And why wait?

Right now, you can get up to $200 off Square hardware at square.com slash go/slash engine.

That's square.com/slash go slash engine.

Run your business smarter with Square.

Get started today.

That is our show this week.

We have a lot more episodes coming up in 2024.

We are publishing through the holidays and we will have our final board meeting of the year on Friday, December 6th.

Our board meetings is when we do a Zoom meeting with all of our paid subscribers.

Way, way, way too many people to put into a Zoom meeting.

It's Athenian democracy up there.

One wise man, that's me, the Socrates of my time.

Garret, my Plato, watching in pain as I suffer my last stand before an unreasonable crowd, that's you guys.

Plus, you can ask us where we get ideas for stories or if I'm still friends with people I used to work with.

I'm just kidding.

Please stop asking that.

We will tell you how the business of the show is doing right now.

We'll have lots of stats, only some of them concerning.

And we'll talk about what we plan to do next.

This is only for our paid subscribers, but don't worry.

If you have not signed up, up, there's still time.

We have a limited amount of paid subscriptions in stock.

Hurry, hurry, act now.

You can sign up for incognito mode over at searchengine.show.

And for everyone who already has, thank you so much.

Again, our final board meeting of the year, Friday, December 6th, 1 p.m.

I just found out, 1 p.m.

Eastern Time.

We will be sending out a Zoom link to join week of knowing me, morning of.

Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions.

It was created by me, PJ Vote, and Truthy Pinamanani, and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John.

Fact-checking by Claire Hyman.

Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bazarian.

Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reese-Dennis.

Thank you to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Burrello, and John Schmidt.

And to the team at Odyssey, J.D.

Crowley, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Matt Casey, Mauric Urin, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schaff.

Our agent is Oren Rosenbaum at UTA.

Follow and listen to Search Engine with PJ Vogue now

for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Thank you for listening.

We'll see you next week.

This episode is brought to you in part by Odo.

Running a business is hard enough, so I make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other.

One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting.

Before you know it, you're drowning in software instead of growing your business.

That's where Odo comes in.

Odoo is the only business software you'll ever need.

It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that handles everything.

CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, HR, and more.

No more app overload, no more juggling logins, just one seamless system that makes work easier.

And the best part?

Odo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost.

It's built to grow with your business, whether you're just starting out or already scaling up.

Plus, it's easy to use, customizable, and designed to streamline every process.

So you can focus on what really matters, running your business.

Thousands of businesses have have already made the switch.

Why not you?

Try Odo for free at odo.com.

That's odoo.com.