This TED Talk features author and activist, Brett Hennig, recorded live at TEDx-Denubia, 2017.

I want to talk about one of the big questions, perhaps the biggest question. How should we live together?

How should a group of people who perhaps live in a city or in the continent or even the whole globe share and manage common resources?

How should we make the rules that govern us?

This has always been an important question.

And today I think it's even more important than ever if we want to address rising inequality, climate change,

the refugee crisis, just to name a few major issues. It's also a very old question.

Humans have been asking themselves this question ever since we lived in organised societies.

Like this guy, Plato, he thought we needed benevolent guardians who could make decisions

for the greater good of everyone. Kings and queens thought they could be those guardians,

but during various revolutions they tended to lose their heads. And this guy, you probably know.

Here in Hungary, you live for many years under one attempt to

implement his answer of how to live together. His answer was brutal, cruel and inhumane. But a different

answer, a different kind of answer, which went more or less into hibernation for 2,000 years, has had profound recent success.

That answer is, of course, democracy.

If we take a quick look at the modern history of democracy,

it goes something like this.

Along here, we're going to put the last 200 years.

Up here, we're going to put the number of democracies, and the graph does this.

The important point of which is this extraordinary increase over time, which is why the 20th century

has been called the century of democracy's triumph, and why, as Francis Fukuyama said in 1989,

some believe that we have reached the end of history,

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