I appreciate your reply. The point I was trying to make is, the contingency of ⌞there being an instance of democratic revolution going smoothly⌝ potentially makes the difference between that straight line happening or not happening. (And if the occurrence took 1000 years—but even that isn’t a given—I would consider that an example of “a god of straight lines” successfully being overpowered.)
I think that if there was sufficient backlash against democratic revolution (unclear if the American Revolution not happening would be enough cause), the then-existing status quo in the West (monarchy / feudalism) would not have gone on- that particular “god of straight lines” dooming feudalism would have been very hard to stop, but the resulting system need not have looked like democracy, and >50% would have been substantially worse by ⌞metrics most westerners care about⌝, though with small probability even better than the form of institutions which we ended up receiving, but largely different from modern notions of democracy.
I appreciate your reply. The point I was trying to make is, the contingency of ⌞there being an instance of democratic revolution going smoothly⌝ potentially makes the difference between that straight line happening or not happening. (And if the occurrence took 1000 years—but even that isn’t a given—I would consider that an example of “a god of straight lines” successfully being overpowered.)
I think that if there was sufficient backlash against democratic revolution (unclear if the American Revolution not happening would be enough cause), the then-existing status quo in the West (monarchy / feudalism) would not have gone on- that particular “god of straight lines” dooming feudalism would have been very hard to stop, but the resulting system need not have looked like democracy, and >50% would have been substantially worse by ⌞metrics most westerners care about⌝, though with small probability even better than the form of institutions which we ended up receiving, but largely different from modern notions of democracy.