I do sometimes wonder if we made a mistake in shedding the theological and feudal hierarchies of the Middle Ages.

Our modern societies are lavish in the rights ghey give the ordinary person, but niggardly in assigning and demanding the duties that must counterbalance those rights Even worse is the assumption that the 'ordinary' person is capable of exercising said rights responsibly. No reasonable person would have voted for either Trump or Johnson, so we might conclude that a large number of people, people who have the right to vote, are incapable of reason.

That assumption of incapability was at the core of almost all the societies that preceded the Enlightenment. Societies which stood and were stable for centuries if not millennia. The Great Experiment of the Enlightenment - the USA - appears to be disintegrating after a mere couple of centuries. Perhaps it is time to recognise that egalitarianism has failed, and return to elitism? But elitism based on what?