Democracy as an attempt to replace religion

 “Our era has already lived through or is preparing to live through the collapse of the three most powerful attempts to replace religion. The collapse of Nazi Germany... The collapse of communism... A third collapse looms, and I hope we'll be able to avoid it: the collapse of capitalist democracies, which would be the failure of scientism, of our attempts to reduce the problems of humankind to a false objectivity, to a sort of mental and physical hygiene, in the manner of ‘unbridled capitalism’ and psychoanalysis.”

René Girard