A 'bewildered herd'.

Byline: Amjed Jaaved - Rawalpindi

THE mob attack on the Capitol Hill engenders several questions about the future of democracy; has it become outdated in the modern age? In his book, 'Iron Law of Oligarchy', Robert Michels, a German-born Italian sociologist and economist, has lamented that only a handful of people within parliament make decisions for the whole country.

While American political dissident Noam Chomsky calls people in a democracy 'a bewildered herd', Michels' theory states that all complex organisations, regardless of how democratic they are in the beginning, eventually develop into oligarchies.

Michels observed that since no sufficiently large and complex organisation can function purely as a direct democracy, power within an organisation will always get delegated to individuals within that group; elected or otherwise.

It is naive of Pakistan to attempt a China model overnight. The Chinese...