The joy of any age is to see new words of ancient lineage showing up in the headlines. This week’s new old word is Kakistocracy. Of likely Greek origin it describes a government overrun and run by the least competent and/or most unscrupulous. I think it might be described as Stage IV Democracy; a kind ICU level of disease of the body politic. The joy of the new old word drains away when you consider an ancient democracy actually needed to create a word that suggests this as a predictable event.

Democracy is a whole body and not a single person. When a democracy deteriorates, it is not only because of one person or even a group large enough to form an oligarchy have won power. When a democracy goes to its terminal stages it is because the collection of systems designed to harvest the public authority of the people is going to disease and rot. When this writer was training classes in The Good Decision and trained the third discernment “My Sense of Democracy” to professional adults, occasionally someone would come up to me and say: “I never thought of it that way.” I was gratified, yet also had to ask myself: “How could anyone not think of it this way”? This is Civics 101 eighth grade level.

You can’t save a democracy if you can’t find it in the tangled up bed of history. Every citizen who ruthlessly savages the public sector of this country is participating in the bleeding out of their democracy. Thoughtful informed criticism is always necessary and certainly a right, but most of the savage criticism is thoughtless and tragically uninformed. We all in a democracy carry within us a core patriotic duty of being two personas; the public self and the private self. I suspect if this democracy happens to be in an ICU, and on its way to the terminal state of Kakistocracy it will be because too many of us have either forgotten or never knew our responsibilities to both our private and public civic identities. It is time to pull out the old dog-eared civics books because the ‘Good’ of democracy is getting lost in the noise and nonsense of the internet, media, and politicized education.