Another thought.

When my neighbourhood was populated 40 years ago, people enthusiastically were planing fruit trees and other blooming trees all aorund. It was among the nicest neighbourhoods in Moscow: you look in the window an see trees, not the surrouning buildings.
And there were flowering meadows all around, not because people planted things there, conversely. THere just were there.

Now it looks different. City aministration hire large teams of Uzbek workers. They assigne them with various tasks, often mad. The problem is that, they ha money to pay to those workers and they MUST spend those money to 'making thigs better'. And Uzbek workers are 'cheap' now. But they don't live here. So "making things better" is

- making lawns of flowering meadows (as result: nothing grows there. Flowers are better than lawns. But veen lawns wont grow there when all that you do is cutting grass)
- cutting down  trees all around.
- gathering leaves in autumn (they are beauiful by the way).

So the local ecosystem is destroyed, blooming trees are cut to make some road wider because city mayor is convering everything with tiles (he is related to tiles prouction) and there is naked hard brown ground where nothing will grow at some places.

ANd there is a noticeable change in how local people view this. 40 years ago the neighbourhood was 'their responsibility'. Now it is officials' responsibility. They will not plant trees here, because: 1) there are other guys tasked with this 2) those other guys will cut it down.

This illustrates how disattachment of people from their environemtn is not really good thing. But it is so far from "Big Politics".
I do not know if democracy is better for big politics or not.

In 1889, the great US writer Mark Twain wrote the following, in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

In case the English is difficult, let me summarize. Mark Twain is saying that all nations are capable of self-government, and always have been. He is saying that the best leaders have always come from the mass of the nation, not from its privileged classes; and that the "best governed most free and most enlightened monarchy" is behind what can be achieved by a democracy. I agree with Mark Twain.

There is a phrase which has grown so common in the world’s mouth that it has come to seem to have sense and meaning—the sense and meaning implied when it is used; that is the phrase which refers to this or that or the other nation as possibly being “capable of self-government”; and the implied sense of it is, that there has been a nation somewhere, some time or other which wasn’t capable of it—wasn’t as able to govern itself as some self-appointed specialists were or would be to govern it. The master minds of all nations, in all ages, have sprung in affluent multitude from the mass of the nation, and from the mass of the nation only—not from its privileged classes; and so, no matter what the nation’s intellectual grade was; whether high or low, the bulk of its ability was in the long ranks of its nameless and its poor, and so it never saw the day that it had not the material in abundance whereby to govern itself. Which is to assert an always self-proven fact:  that even the best governed and most free and most enlightened monarchy is still behind the best condition attainable by its people; and that the same is true of kindred governments of lower grades, all the way down to the lowest.