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It’s easy to assume that year after year, everything gets better as humankind becomes smarter and more advanced.
But is that really the case?
Imagine we could use 100 stick-people to represent all of the more than eight billion people on the planet. How many of those stick people would represent all of the humans that live in a democracy? 1%, 50%, 90%? Imagine in your head right now, 100 stick people and draw a cross through all the ones that match the percentage of humans not living in a democracy.
Did your image look like this?
To save you counting, 28 stick people haven’t been crossed out. Based on research by the V-Dem Institute in 2023, more than two thirds of humans have no choice in who rules over them.
What’s more alarming is the fact that as we become more developed as a species, democracy is becoming rarer. According to Our World in Data, 1.6 billion people have lost democratic rights since 2016 alone. We could argue about how they classify democracy, but that’s just a distraction. The fact that the trend is clearly moving away from democracy is what’s important.
And that shouldn’t be a surprise. Human history tells us that since the advent of farming, human societies have invariably been unequal. This brief spell of multiple, seemingly democratic societies has been a blip. A rise in freedoms that followed the development of ever more efficient methods of killing humans at scale. That may have been just a coincidence, though the two World Wars surely helped accelerate unprecedented social support measures across the Western world.
Meaning that several generations, from the boomers on, have enjoyed a golden age of human freedom. But now it’s on the turn and, left unchecked, normal service will surely be resumed.
So, a good time to ask “whose side are you on?”
And do you think the wealthiest in your society will answer in the same way as you?
While we’re asking questions, would you die for your country? That’s surely the best test of patriotism. Again, will the wealthy answer in the same way as you? When it comes to defending your country, surely those with the most to lose should be the first to die in defense of the nation. But reality shows us that, for all their claims and demands of patriotism, whenever there’s fighting to be done, the wealthy expect the poor to do it. The poor are forced to sacrifice their lives defending the immense wealth of those at the top of society.
If the wealthy were truly patriotic, they wouldn’t allow their societies to waste vast amounts of money paying interest on loans that were never required. The US taxpayers are now paying more in interest every year than they spend on defense and agriculture combined. Everyone should see that’s crazy, but let me present it in a different way, in case you’re one of those who think it’s necessary.
Behold Jethro’s village, an early farming village from 10,000 years ago, where the people are able to grow an excess of food, mainly wheat grain, year after year. There’s enough food for everyone and the chief’s family builds storehouses to store the excess food.
The storehouses full of food help the chief cement his power and increase his status compared to the rest of the people. He brews beer and uses the excess food for grand feasts. Though most of the food is just stored for years, going unused. In fact, every few years, the chief has to build a new storehouse.
After several generations, a new chief starts to borrow excess food from nearby villages and he builds more storehouses to store even more food that he doesn’t need and sits unused.
As he borrowed the food, rather than buying it, he has to pay interest to the other villages. However, he makes the rest of the people in his village pay the interest on the food that they don’t own.
Now, substitute the USA for the village and substitute money for food. That’s how the wealthiest Americans have accumulated almost a third of their wealth. They’ve used their influence over politicians to get the government to borrow money and give it to the wealthy, even though they don’t need it. The government has then forced the rest of the people to pay the interest.
Wealthy Americans will say it’s unfair to make them pay off the debt with money they earned. But they didn’t earn it. If you’re American and not part of the wealthiest 10%, they forged your signature on a loan application and then hid the money under their mattress, while tricking your bank into setting up a monthly payment to pay the interest.
In mid-2025, the wealthiest 10% of Americans had almost $112 trillion while the national debt was about $37 trillion. The debt wasn’t even a third of the wealth owned by the 10%.
Like Jethro’s village never needed to borrow more food, the US never needed to borrow more money. So is it unfair to insist the wealthy use the money they borrowed to pay for the debt they created?
Remember how Hugo said that money was just a way to keep score and rate your success against others? That’s not a fictional idea. Hugely wealthy Americans, from oil magnate H.L. Hunt, through TV mogul Ted Turner, Microsoft founder Bill Gates to President Donald Trump have all made the same claim. Wealth genuinely is just a way to mark status, so why should the poorest in society be expected to pay interest on loans that serve no purpose other than making a small minority of Americans feel more important?
And this isn’t a situation unique to the US. Pick your country and you’ll find a small minority who have captured the mechanism of government to make themselves wealthy at the expense of the majority. For most humans, there’s no illusion of the majority having any genuine say in who governs.
But for the rest of us, are we really enjoying democracy when the only parties we can vote for all work with the wealthy to grow their wealth and power? Probably not, but perhaps this is just as good as it gets. Since the creation of the first countries, human societies have always functioned like this. Perhaps the grown up thing is just to accept that, keep our heads down and let the wealthy do whatever they want.
It’s easier than actually doing anything. But if you’ve got an itchy social finger, while you cogitate the pros and cons of to do or not to do, why not pay a visit to forduckssack.com/amt and browse some of the posts there. They’ve all been posted to be easy to share. It could save you thinking about what to share on your socials for the next few weeks.
Meanwhile, I’ll probably keep on tapping away at the keyboard. Visit forduckssack.com and share your email address if you want to know if I publish anything new.
Jethro H. Forclift
Loser
P.S. I almost forgot to ask. Whose side are you on?
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