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Athenian democracy lasted less than 200 years. Whatever it's institutions, it might be worthwhile to scrutinize any of them given it's collapse. During Athenian democracy Socrates was killed by jury, and both plato and Aristotle wrote books predicting the end of democracy, even people living within it didn't seem to think it was a system with a future.

If plays are enough to change the vote of the people, then those in power aren't the people at all -- it's the people funding the plays or writing the plays. This is a problem we see today, and it's still a risk to democracy. Even as a writer writing books I hope to change the world someday, but I recognize this risk myself -- just writing a compelling book or a compelling play doesn't make your ideas correct or wise or just.

A proper Democrat doing his duty would be an independent thinker, balancing different options and making decisions based on their own train of thought rather than media provided by someone else.

This whole with thinking it's important because in the modern age and onwards, mass media has become a tool where bad narratives can infect the populace. One of the most important tools of the fascists in Italy and the national socialists in Germany was the unified power of the media. People outsource their thinking to compelling rhetoric and support genocidal ideologies they'd never consider on their own.

In my case, every book that I put out is structured in such a way to demand the reader come to decisions on their own. For example, in the one I'm working on right now I'm trying to train the reader in the mindset of post metamodern superpositional thinking, which is fundamentally different than the modernist method of trying to sway my readers to a very specific outcome, and instead is about accepting and balancing many true but contradictory things. If we use that method of thinking, then necessarily decision-making is local and I can't tell you what decisions to make because I'm not you and I don't live where you live.

I often find it difficult to engage with people using modernist frameworks, because they tend to operate within absolutes.

The "assumptions" you've presented here are examples of these. You claim I assume that the only way of manifesting value is longevity, and that I assume that all art is propaganda. These are not assumptions I'd ever make because that's not how I think.

Let's look at the sort of way I do think.

The fact that Athenian Democracy lasted less than 200 years doesn't mean that it's not valuable, but it does mean that it wasn't something robust enough to last a long time.

Rather than viewing Athenian democracy as a pure ideological invention, it makes more sense to see it as a waveform: the product of interacting forces, values, myths, and strategic advantages.The waveform of Athenian democracy then was a combination of things, including success at navy combat, the democratizing influence of the iron age, Helenic culture such as the Greek Gods, the Illiad and the Odyssey, even the failure of kings in prior ages. Athena, goddess of strategic war and civic order, stood in contrast to Ares, the embodiment of raw violence and chaos.

If we assume that a modernist liberal democrat would want their democracy to endure, then Athens — which collapsed into oligarchy and was absorbed into Rome's empire — should be cause for reflection.

A modernist might assume that I'm trying to optimize solely for longevity and they'd be wrong. Obviously a form of government must be many things: Just, stable, consistent, effective, and many more things. Longevity is an important part, since if your form of government goes away, its virtues are meaningless.

Although we'd both agree that ancient Athens and ancient Athenian Democracy had some very positive aspects, we must also admit that it also had a lot of horrible things going for it. It was a slave state, and in historical terms, their behaviour was often duplicitous, especially in how they used the Delian League as a pretext for empire. The story of the Delian League is the epitome of bad behaviour -- they got all the surrounding city-states to contribute to this "league", then ultimately used the money to enrich and empower themselves. Of course they would, one of the dangers of democracy is that people will vote to enrich themselves at the expense of others. A lot of those beautiful stone structures were built with money that was essentially extorted from a fund intended for collective defence. The Parthenon, that mighty symbol of Athenian democracy, was built using funds embezzled from the Delian league.

So in my worldview, it's something we should hold, and something we should learn from, but not something we should hold as sacred so we can use it as evidence a thing is perfect and should not be questioned.

To make your original argument in a different method: Zeppelins were one of the first forms of commercial flight. Commercial flight is a net good for society. Zeppelins used hydrogen, so we should be OK with using hydrogen for commercial flight. Of course, this is an absurd and broken piece of logic -- the hydrogen in zeppelins caused the Hindenburg to burst into flames, ending the age of zeppelins. Today we use other forms of commercial flight. Then you can go "Well just because zeppelins blew up doesn't mean commercial flight is bad" but that's not what I was saying, it was that just because an early form of commercial flight used it doesn't mean it's something we should continue to use.

As for your second point, it seems uncharitable -- even insulting -- for you to think I'm assuming all art is propaganda. I used art as propaganda as evidence that we need to be careful about making mass media into something considered sacred and ineffable. As someone who has spent months working on one book and I'm on track to have my next one published within 30 weeks, I'm not (at least not intentionally) producing propaganda, but I do have to accept the reality of creating art is multi-faceted.

It's true that art changes the viewer if it's effective. It's also true that you can be changed in ways that are either good or bad. It's also true that some of the ways art changes you is through pre-epistemic means such as through emotion and gut feeling and instinct. Those are meaningful ways of knowing something, but they're also not perfect which is why we ultimately developed different methods of knowing. It's true that if everyone is seeing the same message, and that message is flawed, then everyone will be exposed to the same flaw and potentially be similarly flawed. All these things and more are true, and they must all be considered at once because none of them stop being true just because they contradict one another.

Some of the truths about art come from postmodernism, which shows that while it's flawed and modernist when used as a totalizing ideology, it is nonetheless a useful tool to understand the world.

Even when art is not created as propaganda, well-produced and ethically intended media can nonetheless act like it in function if it acts to change people's minds en masse in the same way at the same time, and so while I'm not arguing we should get rid of mass media, I'm arguing we have to treat it with care.

Previously I wrote about Fight Club, and pointed out that many people's understanding of the movie ends with Act 1, the creation of fight club and the deconstruction of consumerist culture. In spite of the fact that it's a 3-act story, many people created fight clubs, but forget the middle where project mayham turns into a modernist postmodernism -- deconstruction systematized, industrialized, totalized, with people working shifts, people being interchangable cogs in a machine intended to deconstruct society's grand narratives or objective truths -- or the third act where the main character fights to return to more traditional structures of morality, meaning, and value.

My ultimate assumption isn't anything that you said, and instead that people ought to think for themselves and not allow themselves to become mindless by allowing themselves to be captured by mass media. Even if you do engage with it, you must engage with it carefully and critically, and not assume that just because it was important in Athenian democracy that it's automatically good -- or even that it's automatically bad.

I understand now why these misunderstandings persist. It isn't because people in modern frameworks aren't intelligent or because they're not trying their best, it's because their framework is primitive. The very same simplicity is one of its superpowers, letting groups hyper-focus on one thing to the exclusion of all else, but the modernist hunger for systematized truth and ideological purity, when pushed to extremes, produced totalizing regimes like fascism and communism — and ultimately enabled the mechanized horrors of the Holocaust. (only to have postmodernism become a modernist ideology in turn, totalizing a totally different set of specific points)