What worries me is that cattle who are marched to a trough every day of their lives and who have never seen grass appear content to eat ground-up corn meal spiked with a variety of drugs and hormones, because they don't know any better. They appear to be giving consent to the arrangement, but do they have a real choice under those circumstances?

The fact is, they'd be far better off out on a natural meadow, eating grass and other plants, as cows did for hundreds of thousands of years until some agri-corporations got the idea of raising them in factory farm conditions.

I think the present public is in a somewhat analogous position, like domesticated animals who don't know or understand what's happening to them. And their leaders are analogous to the boards of directors and CEOs of the agri-corporations.

That's not a healthy situation for the general public, to put it mildly. They imagine themselves to be free, but they are not.

The complete abolition of political parties would go a long way toward fixing our present political system, in my opinion, but I don't expect to see it happen any time soon. "First past the post" would cease to have much relevance if there were no political parties, because a legislature or parliament would not be divided into competing partisan power blocs which jockey against one another, it would be an assembly of independent equals who would have to debate and compromise amongst each other, and they would not be beholden to a party structure or a party line. Each could think and act freely. I think that would be far more likely to produce a real functioning democracy than is the case with a partisan system.