Human nature could not, he declared, long sustain such an enterprise. Inevitably democracy would decay into the tyranny of the mob, the archenemy of virtue and perpetrator of many evils. There is, unhappily, abundant evidence which lend credence to Plato's asseverations.
Human nature seems to habor a number of elements which are inimical to democracy.
And democracy has, after all, been an exceedingly rare and short-lived event in human history. Indeed, it appears that ours is swimming against powerful undertows and that if it is to have any chance of surviving we must then swim hard and swim smart. The facet of this effort with which my work is concerned is the identification of conditions which will, on the one hand, inhibit the flowering of those antidemocratic characteristics which are all too easily mobilized in the human psyche and those which, on the other hand, hold some promise promoting the behavior patterns on which the democratic process depends. In the first case, there are our proclivities for authoritarianism, mindlessness, groupthink, and cultishness. There are our propensities for overgeneralization, for dichotomous thinking, for reorganizing memory to constitute a more coherent story, and our insensitivity to probabilities.