I think it's obvious that everyone who exists in a society cannot be a direct participant in its governing. Primarily because of obvious constraints and the solution we have devised to getting things done: division of responsibilities and labor.
But whose responsibility should it be to run society, for how long, and who chooses them?
The current consensus by the West, which tries to impose its system on every other society — unless they are powerful enough to resist it — is that society should be run by whomever receives the most support and approval from the general populace.
That, on the surface, might seem to make sense. How can someone who isn't chosen by the people lead them after all? Until you get into the details.
Quick aside: It is reasonable to imagine that the popular western democratic system wasn't always as it is right now. But has come to be this way mostly as a result of system/meaning decay over time. That voting used to be exclusive to a well-educated and sophisticated group of people, for example.
Nonetheless, I am going to discuss the democratic system as it currently exists. If it has become what it currently is as a result of system/meaning decay, then this is what it was always destined to be because it lacked inoculation against decay. It is thus fine if judgement is passed on it based on what it has come to be.
It isn't dishonest straw-manning or anything like that. Just a stark examination of a phenomenon based on what is absolutely true about it.
Back to examining how contemporary democratic systems work and problems inherent to it:
i. allowing the general populace to choose
People aren't equal at making decisions. First, people need a wide general knowledge base to be able to think about and make complex decisions. This is only about a general knowledge base acquired from tons of consumption of information over time. Most people lack the curiosity to acquire that knowledge base in the first place. No, they cannot be taught in schools. How much of what people are taught do they remember after taking tests on them? People cannot really be actively taught about things they aren't genuinely interested in so that they remember for a long time thereafter at all. Most things people know and beliefs they hold are transferred to them casually in their regular lives over time.
And that is not to talk about the actual ability to think and carefully weigh different arguments. Or the courage to stand behind their argument after they have come to the 'correct' conclusion in their head.
ii. the process by which we acquire information about who receives the most support from the public
Contemporarily, by the western-dominant-and-imposed system, candidates run media campaigns giving speeches and making promises (to which no one holds them) running up tons of amounts of money which are usually funded through supporter donations (a gaping opportunity for specific private interests to buy their loyalty).
And after all of that is done, individual members of the electorate vote for the candidate of their choice. Whomever wins usually has won having received pretty popular-enough support while fulfilling other specific requirements.
iii. choosing simply by popularity doesn't choose for competence
When you do choose by a popularity contest as it is currently done by popular western democracies, there is no filtering for actual job competence of the candidates, only mass popularity.
In theory, candidates found to be incompetent can be voted out in the next election cycle, or recalled. In reality, the next election cycle is several years away, and all of the time before which, after the discovery of the incompetence of the selected candidate, is entirely wasted. Recall is very difficult and very rarely happens because the default human state is a passive inertia.
What when the next election cycle rolls around or recall happens, and you choose yet another incompetent person? What happens then? Another recall/voting out? After wasting exactly how much time do you think you might be lucky to elect a competent person if you go on with the system as it currently is?
Basically everyone accepts the current state of things as normal. Because, well... the default human state is a passive inertia.
Could you try harder to filter for competence by setting criteria a person needs to fulfill to be eligible for running for election — if running for executive positions for example, that a person needs to show that they have led an organization of a certain size to achieve a specific, tangible goal?
Absolutely. It would make sense to make demands like that to better filter for competence. Another thing that might make sense is restricting the pool of people eligible to vote to higher-quality people. Doing these things, we drastically improve our 'democratic system', even if some problems remain.
What problems remain?
Term limits and the fact of electing, which are a very very big problem.
They disrupt continuity of vision, affect prioritizing, and disincentivize long-term planning (can push certain problems to future administrators) in positions with term limits, while incentivizing bad ethics so as to stay in power by whatever means is necessary in positions without term limits.
A lot of the time spent in power being wasted battling challengers or consolidating power is what has led to popular conclusion by some people that elected leaders do not matter anyway because of the influence that long-serving, illegible bureaucracies exert on everything. Because of which, maybe there should be less focus on elected executive and law-making positions.
They couldn't be more wrong.
The reason bureaucracies contemporarily have the power they do is fundamentally because of the weakness of elected leaders in elected positions, caused by the incentives and disincentives of how the entire system works. By law, and as does make sense, power actually resides in the hands of elected positions.
A bureaucracy is supposed to be a tool used by a person/people with actual ambition/goals to get specific things done, not a tool which acts independently.
Why does the system work the way that it does?
It is all fundamentally a trust problem. The entire system of elections and term limits exists as a check to prevent corruption and despotism. There is a lack of trust that elected leaders would be responsible if handed indefinite, unconstrained power.
Unfortunately, society is a very complex system in which everything affects everything else, including with governance systems. You lack trust in elected leaders and institute certain constrains to keep them in check, thereby unwittingly incentivizing their own malfeasance.
The reason for a fear of handing unconstrained power to leaders which is responsible for the problems with governing is the same thing responsible for everything else: a poor understanding of how things work.
Things People Do Not Understand About How Things Work
i. Trust is a fundamental thing of absolute essence in human relationships because it is the foundation of co-ordination, which is a means to problem-solving. Problem-solving is a natural necessity of human societies in the face of a fundamentally chaotic nature. There are always natural problems to be solved, and only with co-ordinating with other humans who you trust can you solve them.
So... trust is that fundamental to societal functioning, and no system or process can replace it. Trying to replace fundamental human trust means unwittingly creating other problems. Because... well, society is a complex system in which everything is related to and affects everything else.
Solving trust problems is very simple, even as people like to act like it isn't. Understanding the importance of coordination to achieving specific goals, people can just choose to coordinate together by simply believing in one another. Anyone who violates the trust of other people in the group gets permanently removed from the arrangement. Problem solved.
How does this apply specifically to choosing people who govern? The only solution to solving this is simply choosing leaders that you trust. How does that make any sense? How can you put absolute trust in leaders?
This goes to one other thing people do not understand, or do not act in ways commensurate with a belief that they understand, anyway. But:
ii. Humans do not have equal abilities
Everyone understands this with things like athletic or musical skill, and with this, maybe even at an interpersonal level with other people, but seemingly not on a large scale like with governing positions: humans are not equally trustworthy.
In filtering for the quality of candidates, you simply have to filter not only for technical competence, but also for their personal ethics.
Some people believe that "power inherently corrupts" and that anyone allowed enormous power eventually inevitably loses themselves to a supposed inherent intoxicating quality of power. But this would be like believing that anyone becomes a thief if exposed continually to an unsupervised flow or repository of cash. Absolutely not true.
People are not equal in their natural predispositions and abilities, including their sense of morality, or susceptibility to whatever intoxicating quality of power people imagine exists.
Choosing people with an excellent sense of morality and an immunity to whatever intoxicating quality of power people believe does exist might be an extremely difficult problem, but it's not an unsolvable one.
Interestingly, choosing more ethical people doesn't solve all our problems, as there are always extreme, unforeseen circumstances that cause people to act in ways unusual to their character, no matter how ethical they normally are, like when unusually severely compromised by malicious external parties (highly competent and ethical people normally never allow this to happen to themselves), or God forbid, they suffer mental illness.
Whatever system gets put in place to hold people with power responsible needs to account for only these sorts of unusual circumstances, which will likely be rare.
"How would people know when a leader needs to be removed?"
When they do things in obvious contradiction to their publicly stated beliefs. You may think everything is always open to interpretation, but this is not true. Anyone actually astute can tell when people are acting contrary to their publicly stated beliefs.
"Alright, but how do you choose leaders in the first place?"
It cannot be via a permanent process which it is assumed operates indefinitely. Because, any system designed to choose specific people over a long time (democratic governance positions), and/or at scale (employment/school admissions) fails eventually because it begins to get gamed.
This is obvious with the current process of selection in the popular democratic system. Because the requirements to satisfy are clear and apparent, there inevitably come to exist candidates who do not simply happen to fit the required criteria, but who have specifically tailored themselves to fit the criteria and would like to be selected not for reasons for which the process was set up to select specific people, but to satisfy their individual interests.
If not by a permanent process, how then do you choose? The process of selecting has to be constantly changing. That's the only way there never exists a system whose requirements are well-understood and can be gamed. For some specific executive positions for example, one easy way to solve this problem of a need for a continually-changing process is to allow the outgoing executive to design the process of selecting the incoming individual. After all, who better than someone who has excelled in a role understands that role and everything it requires better than they themselves?
"Wow. All of that is crazy. Nowhere have you mentioned taking into account the opinion of the people. This is totalitarian."
Interestingly, this is how society already almost entirely works. Society works by certain high-agency people with commensurate talent/resources deciding in what direction society goes. Think about the Green Revolution. Was it everyone coming together to decide on how to prevent foreseeable doom? Nope. It was just a couple of people deciding the fate of the entire world. As it was with the Green Revolution, so it is with space exploration, or things like immigration policy, business law, healthcare policy and other things like that in any specific society.
What "the people" want usually doesn't matter. You can think about your local environment and wonder how much of what happens with the current system is what you individually want.
"It just means my side lost at the polls"
People who voted for the other side, where do you think they got the ideas which shaped their opinions and vote? Who controls the media, is it people with specific private interests, or "the people"? Even if your side did win, the elected people have probably ended up doing none of the things they promised while campaigning. Only things in their own specific private interests.
The current system likes to lie about how things actually work and obfuscate everything. There is a lot of lying about 'rights' and 'freedoms', and who is in actual control of society. It is definitely not "the people". Everything is controlled by people with the resources, power and agency to move things in the direction which they want things to go.
At least this system is honest about how things actually work and tries to choose high-quality people (technical and moral competence) who care about their broad responsibility (pursuit of the stated goals of a society). The details of how they do that doesn't need to be understood by the general populace.
The only people who need to be in the know to know who has become dishonest and needs to be removed are other people around them who have been selected for technical and ethical competence. The details of how they do that is not important. If their process for doing that ever fails, the monarch exists as a failsafe for correcting all failing or failed processes in any part of the entire system and will swoop in.
The monarch is why this specific system works at all, and indefinitely.
Some people may think you can have high-quality people with no term limits for everything, at each level and band of governance and wonder why you need a single person (a monarch) at the top with ultimate responsibility for everything.
This is why.
The monarch serves two functions:
i. a co-ordinating bridge between all levels and bands of governance.
ii. meta-system design: a corollary of being a bridge, the legibility of the entire system to the monarch allows them the perpetual ability decide what changes need to be made to what ever part of the complex system requires it.
Without the monarch, if you only chose high-quality people with no term limits, there would remain a problem of coordinating between the different levels and bands of governance and an inability to modify the system to adapt to changes in reality over time.
The only way to beat this system is to literally checkmate the monarch: (i) trap them so that they are absolutely compromised and have to be removed, and (ii) ensure that all potential candidates to replace them are under your control.
I do not believe any person or organization alive right now is capable of executing anything close to this. And if they do come to exist, well, this is why the monarch is an exceptional meta-designer. It is their job to anticipate these sorts of potential attacks and modify the system to resist them.
Recap:
i. The current conception of democracy is a lie that allows low-quality people to maintain a hold on political power while failing at their jobs and leaking power to bureaucracies and private individual interests. it is possible that the system used to work in the past, but this is what has come to be.
ii. The best new system filters for competence (technical and moral) and removes term limits and elections (create bad incentives/eventually become gamed), while creating the position of a chief designer who is tasked with making changes to the system as needed over time.