A group of people wait for early voting in the 2008 Election.

As the 2008 election season finally comes to a close, today is the day that we (hopefully) find out the end result. Regardless of the outcome, though, it’s worth pondering today, maybe while it creeps into hour three of your wait in the voting line, how lucky we are to actually be able to have a chance to make the selection of who is in the government. More particularly, how lucky we are to be able to choose who’s at the top of the heap. For most of human history, this is not how things went.

From the best available evidence that we have, when humans first started organizing themselves into groups, it was typically along family lines. Depending on the culture, the leader of the group was either the oldest male or the oldest female in the family who was still capable of stringing sentences together. As time grew by and groups got larger, leading women and old men were generally gracefully pushed aside for either a council of sorts, or the group was simply led by the biggest, scariest man.

The “biggest, scariest man” model of leadership has dominated most of human history, albeit generally modified to be “biggest, scariest man and his descendants, who are hopefully also big and scary so as not to invite a coup d’etat.”

But as nations grew and empires became more and more common as the big, scary guys who ran things wanted to test their mettle against other big, scary guys, there developed a class of people whose job it was to keep things running while the leader was distracted by trying to either kill other people or avoid being killed by other people. Sometimes this class was of a religious nature and sometimes not, but the end result was the same: bureaucracy. The institutionalization of government so that it could survive while the leaders were off warmongering.

It is bureaucracy that, as much as it is complained about, truly allowed for stable human governance. It was bureaucracy that kept the Roman Empire alive even as the Emperors kept getting killed off, went insane, or both. Bureaucracy kept the Egyptian and Incan Empires going even as it became increasingly clear that the offspring of brother-sister marriages didn’t exactly make for the best of leaders. Chinese bureaucracy is still the standard by which other bureaucracies measure themselves.

Bureaucracy allowed for the smooth transition of rulers, and as time went on, slowly decreased the need for wars of succession, as the increasing prevalence of the rule of law made the pretexts for such wars less necessary. Of course, they never went out of style completely, but as law and bureaucracy prevailed even against the power of kings, government became more and more representative of the people in it. Well, at least the rich, property-owning people in it.

This trend of monarchies giving way to bureaucracy giving way to democracy has happened several times in human history. It happened in Athens and other Greek City states. It happened in Rome before they decided to discard republicanism in favor of monarchy again. It happened in the Iriquois Confederation. More importantly to the modern world, it happened in England and the United States, which has since led to a blossoming of representative government throughout the world over the past two centuries.

The current state of the world is a rare and unique thing in human history. More countries now are democracies than at any other time. Even in countries that are de facto dictatorships use the trappings of democracy to try and legitimize their (thoroughly illegitimate) rule. The idea that government exists by the consent of the governed is slowly becoming a universal human idea.

So if you haven’t had a chance to vote early yet, then as you take the time to vote today, it’s important to remember that you’re exercising a privilege that has been denied to most people throughout human history. A privilege that still does not exist for billions of people today. It’s easy to be cynical about politics, elections, and all the trappings that go with it. Frankly, that cynicism is often largely deserved. But despite that cynicism, it’s important to realize that of all the types of government every dreamed up and tried, only democracy seems to work. Not all the time, not every time, but in most times and places, it’s the one system that allows people to flourish to their highest potential.

And that’s something worth cherishing.