Bhutan, after prioritizing happiness, now faces an existential crisis

King thinks democracy is a great idea. Everyone rejects it. King institutes it anyway.

Wait a second...

The people could vote the same person or party in representing the interests of the king and his family. Dictators can be democratically elected.

The real question is how do you protect people from themselves?

It's not for you to protect them from themselves.

> This is the first principle of democracy: that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately. And the second principle is merely this: that the political instinct or desire is one of these things which they hold in common. Falling in love is more poetical than dropping into poetry. The democratic contention is that government (helping to rule the tribe) is a thing like falling in love, and not a thing like dropping into poetry. It is not something analogous to playing the church organ, painting on vellum, discovering the North Pole (that insidious habit), looping the loop, being Astronomer Royal, and so on. For these things we do not wish a man to do at all unless he does them well. It is, on the contrary, a thing analogous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing one's own nose. These things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly. I am not here arguing the truth of any of these conceptions; I know that some moderns are asking to have their wives chosen by scientists, and they may soon be asking, for all I know, to have their noses blown by nurses. I merely say that mankind does recognize these universal human functions, and that democracy classes government among them. In short, the democratic faith is this: that the most terribly important things must be left to ordinary men themselves—the mating of the sexes, the rearing of the young, the laws of the state.

> for you to protect them from themselves

It certainly is, because society has consequences over the individual.

People cannot be free to damage you: it is not «protect[ing] them from themselves», it is "protecting yourself from them".

I am certain Xi and Putin and Trump think it is their right and prerogative to "protect people from themselves". Just like you.

This is for example the justification used to ban books. Certain books, when read, give people incorrect ideas, and we need to protect them from themselves.

No, the point is that you'd better "protect yourself from them". That one should not «protect people from themselves» is opinable, but as that one is directly involved, a better question is "how to protect yourself" - which is a revolution in perspective.

That some people may have had a position (and that is also to be shown) that coincidentally overlaps with something that be confused as related to the above changes nothing (of the truthfulness of the idea).