The Greeks thought that. By actual empirical measures democracies do unambiguously better, beyond what can be explained by individual leaders. It comes down to autocracies never actually being one man rule, because the lower downs have their own agendas and palace intrigues, too.

[–] Gsus4@mander.xyz 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The rest of my comment addresses that. The "good king" father figure does a lot of heavy lifting for autocracy in people's subconscious (even Plato's haha), but it is inevitable for a "benevolent monarch" with the mandate to "fix everything" to turn sour and abuse power, the variance of one single individual's performance and world iew is too high. Aristotle writes about some of this too.