The Greeks noticed a cycle in politics. They called it Anacyclosis. Because they thought of anarchy as the starting point of the cycle. But for us the cycle happens a little slower and it begins with democracy.

Democracy leads to socialism because the people vote to have the government solve all their problems making government larger until it monopolizes the economy and we are in defacto socialism

Socialism destroys itself through incompetence leaving anarchy

From anarchy emerges dictatorship, possibly with feudalism as an intermediary if the land area in question is large.

Dictatorship turns into oligarchy upon the death of the dictator. They will probably retain a king as a figurehead but unless they have equal talents to their predecessor they won’t have equal control. All dictatorships are really oligarchies behind the mask.

Oligarchy turns into democracy via the inevitable explosion of discontent that results from the incompetence and or greed of the oligarchs. And now we are back at the start.

What drives this cycle?

I wonder if this is actually a blame game. From anarchy emerges a great man that is willing to be accountable for all. Then when bad things happen on the occasion that they inevitably will then the blame gets spread amongst the level below the top resulting in a more inclusive government until you get to democracy. At which point the blame gets pushed back up into the bureaucracy which responds by growing until it explodes

Either way we seem to be gaining some subconscious understanding of the cycle because while we haven’t stopped the cycle we have improved our governance systems enough to slow it down to the point where we no longer notice the cycle exists. We no longer even have a word for the cycle as my autocorrect is informing me. This is a win. But should we go further and stop the cycle? If so on which stage of the cycle should we stop.

The fact that all companies use the same structure as each other suggests they have found something that works well. I’d describe it as an oligarchically elected dictatorship. With a weighted vote democracy choosing the oligarchs. So you could call it a democracy, dictatorship, or oligarchy depending on which aspect you think is most important. We should just call it the company structure though since that loses none of the nuance.

The key difference between countries and companies, is the speed of evolution, since the time between generations of companies is much shorter than the time between generations of companies. One company generation is approximately 50yrs while a country generation is more like 500yrs on average. So companies evolve quicker and therefore it seems likely that countries are probably just behind and will ultimately end up in the same place as companies. That is a mix of all stages of the cycle.