Human history is a trail of tragedy perpetrated by regular people no different from you and me. To think that you are somehow different than all those that came before is pure egoism.
This is sophistry. Of course some people are different from others. Only a tiny minority of people living in the U.S. will commit violent crimes over the course of their lives, despite a much larger minority living in poverty or facing other hardships. Those who commit violent crimes are different by choice. If you don't think those of sound mind are responsible for their own actions, it's hard to see how you can think of democratic society as anything but a doomed experiment.
>Only a tiny minority of people living in the U.S. will commit violent crimes over the course of their lives
And this is a result of the society we live in (welfare state, etc), not a fundamental property of us as a people. Take all those things away and you will see a very large increase in violent crime. My point is that the difference between those who commit crimes now and those that don't is simply a matter of degrees. Nothing you've said contradicts that.
Of course people are responsible for their own actions; what people are not are analytical machines that consider all possible scenarios independent of emotions and drives. It is the drives and emotions that strongly bias our internal scoring system for various decisions. So in this sense we are prone to acting irrational when it is in our best interest (from the perspective of our primitive brain). Society is constructed to allow us to provide for our basic needs so that we can suppress our basic instincts and make the best rational decisions collectively. Democracy does not crumble in the face of partially irrational actors.
If you don't think those of sound mind are responsible for their own actions,
Pretty big assumption here, don't you think? Poverty can drive a person crazy, and when national economic policies proscribe mandatory unemployment so that oligarchs will stop crying about wage prices, bad things can be seen as being designed into the system. There are no rational actors, just self-interested ones.
This is sophistry. Of course some people are different from others. Only a tiny minority of people living in the U.S. will commit violent crimes over the course of their lives, despite a much larger minority living in poverty or facing other hardships. Those who commit violent crimes are different by choice. If you don't think those of sound mind are responsible for their own actions, it's hard to see how you can think of democratic society as anything but a doomed experiment.