I'm not really talking here about democracy as a particular system of state political organization. For the purpose of this diary, I'm thinking of it more as a form of social behavior involving learning and sharing and decision making and creating, which I happen to prefer to approach as a set of interrelated, discursive, and radically participatory processes. In that sense, I believe the diary highlights the inevitable incompleteness of knowledge and, thus, the need for individuals to rely on each other collectively to achieve any given societal goal. I don't think this precludes or even has much to do with whether we organize our political system along "representative" lines. I do think it precludes justifications of authority of the type that the diary reacts against (for example, imposing our will on others, etc.). I also don't think it's useful to see Chris's list as a finite set of knowledge to be "amassed" by experts. As I wrote in my previous comment, each of us has his or her own kind of familiarity/expertise with these and other issues, and each of must rely on others to access and generate new knowledge and make and re-make decisions.