basics of despotism vs democracy: vintage video

check this out, it's amazing, and useful; the differences between "despotic" and "democratic" systems; how to rate your community:

to sum up: what sort of community do you live in? to find out, you can rate it on these scales: respect (restricted -> shared) and power (concentrated -> shared). to predict what way it is likely to go in the future, rate it on the economic distribution (slanted -> balanced) and information (controlled/automatic acceptance -> uncontrolled/critical evaluation) scales. the lower the community rates on these scales, the further from democracy and closer to despotism it is. the standing of a community concerns first of all its members, but also affects other communities and the standing of the nation as a whole.

[the only issue i have with the video is that all the "protagonists" except for a secretary and a teacher are men. it makes it look like the public sphere is pretty much exclusively male - which isn't true, even for '46. so what message does that send? the fact that everyone is white isn't so surprising for the time period. ...but at least the graphic for democracy shows both men and women holding hands, and lynching is briefly shown as an example of injustice within a nominally "democratic" state. so i suppose it's all "good." mostly.]

from king of zembla, via redneck mother, via i blame the patriarchy, hosted by google videos
(speaking of despotism, though, remember google sucks)
author: encyclopaedia brittanica (1946)