To expound on what I've already said, I don't think there's fundamentally any difference in how modern citizens of democracies interact with their leaders (political or economic) with how peasants interacted with kings, emperors, and the nobility. We grumble about what they do but ultimately defer to them as masters of our fate. The only real difference is that every two or four or six or however many years we have legal recourse for our grumblings, but the existence of those other years reinforces our peasantry and allows them to co-opt our decision making.
I see this not as freedom but as a stop gap measure, a half measure that makes us complacent by giving us the illusion of progress, much in the same way that unions and minimum wage give workers the illusion that they have power over employers while in fact they are a band-aid to keep us complacent while we do nothing to deal with the core problem that makes workers subservient. Representative democracy gives the people the illusion of control over their country's future, but in fact simply gives our masters a certain benefit of the doubt that they are not in fact masters so that they can continue to exploit and control as have more de jure masters through out history.
We are still slaves. The power structures still exist as they always have. We just feel better about it.
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Originally Posted by J.R.R. Tolkien
There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as ‘patriotism’, may remain a habit! But it won’t do any good, if it is not universal.
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