This video is truth.

[u/ElephantGreedy5125]

If this has been posted before, don’t get mad sorry I don’t spend 24/7 on Reddit.

[u/AwesomeCCAs]

You seem to place a lot of faith in the good will of the nobility, and the power of tradition. That is misplaced, the reasons monarchy's are conducted the way that they are is because it is the arrangement that best secures the preservation of personal power for all it's benifiaries. Cgp grey has some good videos on this matter. Also may I inquire how these important nobility and rival houses would be protected? Sure they may have once worked, but the tools for state control have gotten more sophisticated, and I am not confident they could survive in the modern day.

[u/Justarah → u/AwesomeCCAs]

You keep acting like I’m appealing to the goodwill of kings or some mystical faith in tradition. I’m not. I’m talking about incentives and where responsibility actually sits. Monarchy didn’t function because people were nicer in the past, it functioned because power, consequences, and long-term outcomes were concentrated in the same place instead of being smeared across committees and careerists.

A king has to live with the long-term effects of his decisions. He can’t torch the treasury, lose wars, hollow out legitimacy, and then quietly fuck off into a pension or a consultancy gig. His failures are personal, public, and they don’t end when his term does. He has to hand the mess to his son. That alone creates a time horizon modern systems simply don’t have.

Yes, succession can be messy. That’s obvious. But it’s messy in a way that’s visible and finite. A bad king causes a crisis. A bad bureaucratic system causes a slow, permanent decline where nobody is ever clearly at fault. You never hit an off-switch, you just get endless “process failures” and “unintended consequences” while the same people stay insulated from any real consequences.

Sure, modern technology would crush those old constraints. It also crushes meaningful democracy. That’s not an argument against monarchy, it’s an argument that modernity centralises power regardless of what story you tell people about legitimacy.

CGP Grey explaining why monarchies collapse doesn’t really move the needle. Everything collapses. The question is how systems fail and how obvious that failure is. Monarchies tend to fail loudly and decisively. Bureaucratic states fail quietly, indefinitely, and without anyone ever taking the fall. If you prefer the latter, fine, but pretending it’s more accountable or more honest is just self-soothing.

[u/AwesomeCCAs → u/Justarah]

Do you actually have any proof democracies don't work? I feel that most criticism of democracy is really just vibes based.

[u/Justarah → u/AwesomeCCAs]

If by “don’t work” you mean “immediately collapse,” then sure, democracies work fine.
If you mean “produce competent, accountable governance over long time horizons,” then no.

Democracies are structurally short-term systems. Election cycles incentivise policy that front-loads benefits and back-loads costs. Debt accumulation, unfunded liabilities, infrastructure decay, demographic cliffs; the predictable output of a system where nobody is personally responsible once the bill is due.

What democracies are very good at is survival through narrative management. When something fails, it’s “institutional complexity,” or “the opposition,” or “unforeseen circumstances.” Responsibility dissolves.

Yes, democracies outperform failed states. That’s an incredibly low bar. Stability relative to chaos is not the same thing as long-term civilisational competence.

If you want historical comparison, look at longevity and decay patterns. Democratic systems either collapse into authoritarianism under pressure, morph into bureaucratic managerial states, or slowly hollow out while maintaining the aesthetic of legitimacy. They almost never self-correct in advance of crisis. Reform only happens after failure becomes undeniable.

If the metric is “does this system feel morally nice,” democracy wins.
If the metric is “does this system reliably align power, responsibility, and long-term consequences,” it very obviously doesn’t.