Just a thought I had relating to a way to 'explain' anarchy and democracy.
Power lies in communities of connected people. Those who know each-other and live closely with one another have a public reputation to maintain and a common-goal of peace and harmony in their immediate living environment. Nobody wants to deal with harassment or trouble on their front doorstep.
Criminals might consider being bad somewhere else but they are unlikely to do so in front of people who see them enter and leave their house every day. Reputation.
Or in places that they themselves will have to use regularly. Self interest.
Because such a group is so powerful the common-goal (or objective) that they choose to enact is very important.
A bad actor can see that influencing the objective of a community could yield them great power and wealth.
Well-connected communities are hard to influence. The fewer people there are and the better they know each-other, the more difficult it becomes to convince them to perform or consent to work that doesn't benefit each of them equally, or appears to have ulterior motives.
The small number of people in this community are heavily involved, and will scrutinize the decisions made by other members. There aren't many people so it doesn't take too much time or effort to understand what is really happening.
Fucking people over is difficult.
Democracy forces these smaller communities to gift their community-membership to a politician.
Lots of small, well-connected communities have now been consolidated into one 'large' malleable group that resides in a single physical location (parliament) that exists in a community of shared living environment.
The power of thousands of communities now rests in just one centralized community.
Individuals are smart, large groups are stupid. The more members, the harder it is to scrutinize and make informed decisions.
As these politicians now share a common interest with each-other (more-so than with their constituents), they choose objectives that are more important to themselves than the population-at-large.
These objectives might be directly beneficial to the politicians (higher pay) or purchased by third parties. This 'purchase' may be in the form of bribery (giving politicians secret money), but also through influence.
One only needs convince this single centralized group that a particular objective is worth pursuing for it to go ahead. A media campaign using the 'anything is true if you say it often enough' tactic could purchase the power of this group.
Any good?