Everything that lasts very long serves a purpose or fulfills a function. Processes of cause and effect generally drive change and evolution toward more complex combinations of matter, energy, and consciousness. Especially in the realm of human culture and human consciousness, however, every manifestation of progress tends to cause some unintended consequences or dysfunctions. The functions and dysfunctions of aristocracy and democracy are summarized below.

Positive Functions of Aristocracy

• Decision speed: the king or prince or top-ranking aristocrat gets to decide
• Predictability, stability (when the environment is predictable and stable)
• Ease of training future leaders: just do what your parents and other authorities did
• Certainty about who is in charge: the rules are the rules

Dysfunctions of Aristocracy

• Concentration of power: no outside ideas allowed, no matter how good
• Absence of empathy: who cares what happens to the vast majority of people
• Possible incompetence of leaders: in this context, ignorance can be blissful
• Followers have no say, no matter how smart or well informed
• Ignorance is a prerequisite to acceptance of the social system

Positive Functions of Democracy

• Everyday people have a say about their own lives
• Individual freedom
• Personal responsibility
• Diversity of opinion
• Social mobility

Dysfunctions of Democracy

• Potential corruption by special interests
• Potential partisanship; ideology; demagoguery
• Frequent and rapid change and discontinuity
• Slow decision-making
• Ambiguity of authority
• Need for expensive universal education

By the end of the eighteenth century, philosophers and common folk in several European nations had concluded that aristocracy was a long-running mistake, ultimately unable to meet modern challenges and ripe for revolution. Power, they concluded, should be dispersed among the educated people, not concentrated within a few families, and it should always be exercised with the consent of the governed. Aristocratic systems crumbled when the power holders at the top forgot or neglected their responsibility to the community and got lost in their own narcissistic and sociopathic worlds of power, prestige, and privilege. Widespread recognition emerged that the role of a leader in any community implies greater responsibility as well as greater rewards, and that the ultimate purpose of leadership in all times and places is not simply to benefit the individual leader but to enhance the community’s capacity to survive and adapt over the long term.

One of the drawbacks of aristocracy (or any system of entrenched power) is that it tends to resist change even when change is necessary and can seldom adapt to the need for significant change without significant violence. The people who hold power want to hang on to it and they usually have the means to oppress those who want to take it away. Reason, logic, and persuasion don’t usually work with people who want to hold on to entrenched power and have a well-armed military on their side.

The first people to pull off a full-fledged democratic revolution were the British colonists in North America in the late eighteenth century, and they first tried to make their case to their British rulers through logic and reason. That attempt failed, so the American Revolution and soon afterward the French Revolution brought a violent overthrow of British and French aristocracies in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. In North America, the democratic revolution that ultimately created the United States, a Declaration of Independence written by 32-year-old Thomas Jefferson located the source of governmental power within “the consent of the governed,” not the whims of royalty.

The new system would not be ruled by hereditary rulers but rather presided over by presiders or presidents. In government, presidents and other officials had to be specifically chosen by their subjects, or citizens, who thus had to assume ultimate responsibility for the leadership they chose.  From the beginning, this new democratic process was patently experimental.  Its basic principles were committed to writing in formal constitutions; but the spirit of experimentation and continuous learning was incorporated in a specific self-renewing process for revision or amendment.

Democracies depend upon the widespread sharing of power and information rather than the concentration of power in a few families. The key principles of democracy are individual equality and liberty, and the challenges of democracy lie in the need to balance individual rights with the general welfare of the whole community, including the welfare of minority groups. Democracy is really nothing more than a long-drawn-out process of discussion, dialogue, and debate, which prevents violence and hasty decisions, but which also requires great patience and great faith, both in the process itself and in the other human beings involved in the process. Under normal circumstances, democracies take a long time to make decisions, but the decisions they make tend to be much more effective in the long run because they tend to integrate a wide array of viewpoints and because people are much more likely to support decisions they helped to make than decisions that are forced upon them by others.

Democracies flourish where people are educated, where information flows freely, where dissent and disagreement are not only tolerated but encouraged, and where diversity of opinion is valued as a source of creativity. The process of democratic conversation may often seem wasteful and time-consuming, but it is clearly superior to the narrow, self-centered snap judgments frequently rendered by aristocracies (or by hunter-gatherers, for that matter). It may require greater patience, greater faith in our fellow citizens, greater investment in education, and greater tolerance for diverse opinions, but democracies pay great dividends in terms of social justice, individual freedom, creative fulfillment, and peaceful problem solving.

There is, in fact, a direct link between the democratic spirit of 1776 and our twenty-first-century understanding of leadership behavior.  The historical reality is that our language never included the word "leadership" itself until the advent of the democratic revolutions.  The word "leader," denoting an individual who goes ahead of a group to show the way, has existed in our language since the thirteenth century.  The word “leadership," however, referring to the process of leading followers, first appeared in our language precisely at the time of the first democratic revolutions.  By the end of the eighteenth century, we needed a new word to describe a new reality on the face of the earth. Concepts of rulership, dominance, coercion, and manipulation simply became inadequate to understand or represent this new reality.  Just as we had to make up the word "automobile" to describe the horseless carriage mass produced by Henry Ford, we had to make up the word "leadership" to describe the way groups, organizations, and communities would govern themselves in the new world of democratic process.

Thus leadership, in other words, is essentially a democratic practice that functions only in a reciprocal collaboration with followership. Leaders and followers in a democratic culture need each other more profoundly than do rulers and subjects, tyrants and slaves, or bosses and workers.  In a democratic culture, knowledge is the most important form of power, and education is its source.  Ironically, aristocracies had an easier time educating leaders because it was easier to determine who the leaders in each generation would be — they were usually the firstborn sons of the previous rulers.  Democracies, however, have to educate everybody for leadership and for followership. 

In a democracy, leaders cannot legitimately claim any special privileges apart from their leadership roles, since they represent, are chosen by, and draw all their power from their followers. In the life of any democratic community, we can think of leadership and followership as reciprocal aspects of citizenship.  In the context of human cultural evolution, leaders and followers act together in a communal attempt to adapt to a challenging environment, to solve common problems, and to capitalize on shared opportunities–largely through experimentation.  Followership is not the opposite of leadership but rather its mirror image. The qualities of effective leaders are virtually the same as the qualities of effective followers. The opposites of both followership and leadership are apathy and alienation. The democratic experiment has been messy and sometimes even chaotic, but our shared vision of democratic self-governance has expanded over the last two centuries to include people who were originally left out. As Winston Churchill once said, democracy is the worst possible form of government–except for all the others.

In the wake of the American and French Revolutions in the eighteenth century, a wave of democratic revolutions has swept over much of the world. Ironically, democratic societies are themselves essentially nonviolent and are at least theoretically committed not only to dispersing power nonviolently but also to transmitting power from generation to generation and from regime to regime through peaceful means with the consent of all involved. Despite what will surely be the temporary rise of authoritarian leaders in the second decade of the twenty-first century, the democratic experiment seems to be working.