But what about democracy? We are all raised to believe that democracy is a huge achievement of man, that it is a much more benign and enlightened form or government, that it represents another step in the inevitable upward evolution from the desperate 'brutish, mean, and short' life of primitive man toward civilization and then democracy. But I have started to question this. Democracy evolved out the taker totalitarian states that lock up the food, and democracy locks up the food even more effectively than totalitarian states do. It seems that once the totalitarian state had trained everyone to believe that life consisted of 'death and taxes', distributed totalitarianism, or capitalism, was a much more effective way to increase the surplus produced each year. Democracy made the life of the peasant worse. Under totalitarianism, at least you only had one despot to please. Now, you have a multitude of despots competing to produce the most surplus on your back. • Ishmael.org, the work & philosophy of Daniel Quinn