Similarly, even after the Occupy movement fizzled in the West, it carries on in Hong Kong. The protesters continued to occupy buildings and block roads and disrupted regular business, and young twenty-something leaders took up screen time passionately talking about socio-economic injustice, and vowing to smash the system, the very system which helped them grow up and voice their opinion. It's not just Hong Kong. We have seen ebbs and tides in this pattern of mass protests from New York to London, from Delhi to Moscow.

This raises the most important debate of our times, the subject of preserving order. As more and more of these mass movements spread throughout the world, with everyone from occupiers to jihadists trying to spawn a new world order, leaders everywhere face a very old dilemma, a Machiavellian paradox: whether to be loved or feared, to preserve order and social fabric around them or choose reform. As Tocqueville mentioned, after revolution, the reactions come. The demands of this, for the lack of better word, "Grecian direct democracy" are, however, surprisingly made through anarchistic or terroristic actions by these groups, actions which are directly opposed to whatever these groups want to achieve or emulate.

Unfortunately, what Zamoyski and other historians fail to mention is that order and stability are what give us a better lifestyle and peace. It is a far too interconnected world, and all countries, regardless of their political ideologies, are entwined in a global system of political and economic inter-dependence. No one, whether a rising power or an established power, wants to destroy this system because the burden of creating and preserving a new system will then fall on the destroyer's shoulders. History has proven time and again, from ancient Greece, to Carthage, to Persia, to the Mughals, to the World Wars, how disastrous the breakdown of a system can be. Moreover, the modern world is far too complicated for either direct democracy or anarchy.

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