Except it didn't work just fine, because most of our history was heavily marred by violence, injustice, rigid hierarchy, credulity, and oppression. It's only since the creation of (largely Western) systems of government that the average person has had a fighting chance at all, and your previous assertions about the arbitrariness of Western governance are in fact completely ass-backwards.
Violence and injustice are generic issues you're throwing out which exist everywhere, and there isn't even a reason to believe that there's less "injustice" in developed Western liberaldemocracies than elsewhere. How do we even define injustice? What is unjust?
Va((ine passports might get the gold medal in recent history, but even more abstractly, from a communist point of view I could tell you that capitalism itself is "unjust", because private property under capitalism is, by definition, not for everyone, or you would have a society of only employers and not also employees. This kind of unequal spread of property doesn't exactly allow for universal human development. You don't have to agree with the commie analysis in particular but the point here is that "Justice" is something that differs in definition from person to person, that's why people have different political ideas and vote (when they do) different parties. This without taking into account the interests of their own clique, but even those affect their idea of what is just and what isn't.
Rigid hierarchy? Towards whom? Your parents? The town's priest? I can digest this hierarchy, one based on custom and respect, not to mention informal, but here all hierarchies that organically emerged from thousands of social development erode in favor of a nanny state. They have to, because they're "competition" to it. This is the essence of totalitarianism. At least those hierarchies were natural, or as close as they came to it.
Credulity? My dude, if this is a jab at religion... religion gives us a sense of the sacred, it allows us to value what's around us. What do we value now? And how are we less credulous if we buy every stupid excuse to degrade our own lives? First you must save the banks, then you must get the gene therapy to save grandma, then you must pay thrice as much for gasoline for the Ukrainians (a speculation not even related to them, in reality), and then you must be on diet as the grocery stores empty themselves and your own democratic government starves you into eating bugs because cow farts are going to kill us all. Random examples here, I can also apply this to every war that we fought in the last 50 years, wars we entusiastically supported back then but then with two decades of hindsight we disavow, and we keep repeating this cycle over and over because "No, dude, this time it's different", except it never is. And so many other examples I could think of.
The foundation of Western legal philosophy is the idea that law should be dictated by axiom and precedent, while the alternative you favor is a legal system which is decided by whim. Whim of the people, or whim of a dictator; the difference doesn't really matter in practice, because both are necessarily arbitrary, and therefore contain no hard limits on their application. This is tyranny; not freedom.
No, that's the foundation of Common Law, it isn't the foundation of European judicial systems, for example, or those of most of the world. In fact, it's the whim of the state ("contained" and codified in constitutions and legal codes) that's the foundation of most Western judicial systems.
The central problem with your argument, I think, is that you appear to subscribe to the teenage glibertarian view which holds that freedom is best defined by the absence of authority, when really, a much better way to measure it is through the presence of choice. To truly empower someone, you give them the power to choose the course of their destiny—free of oppression and coercion—and the fact remains that you will overwhelmingly find a lot more of this kind of freedom in the West than you will in less civilized places. It's not merely a matter of money, either, because Spain is clearly a much freer society than Qatar, despite the latter having a much larger GDP per capita.
You won't get rid of authority that easily and I wouldn't even want to, but the authorities we have today are inorganic, unnatural, artificial. They are not the product of any real social or historical development but rather the practical application of some formulas conceived by some idiots three centuries ago. The state, especially the modern one, is an abstraction you're beaten and forced and taxed into pretending it's real when it isn't, on its own it's just papers, but these papers have physical enforcers. This is not a natural thing, this is not how human societies work.
We didn't need laws and fines to not go around naked or not kill each other, it was social custom and pressure. It wasn't the state you needed to fear if you acted wrongly, but your fellow man, the punishment was the shame and the humiliation from the people you knew but the state has replaced itself to our neighbour as the enforcer of conduct (one that I can't even necessarily call good one), the abstraction has replaced the physical and that's one of my biggest beefs with the modern world: it's idealistic, by which I don't mean that it fantasises impossibile upheavals but literally that it makes you act according to ideas (the ones contained in the god-papers) rather than material life around you. Today Society itself, something material and observable though not quantifiable and placeable on paper (thank God for that) acts according to the idea of the law rather than itself, it's shackled itself to the abstraction.
What kind of empowerment do you see here? How is cohercion by abstraction better than pressure by society?
Qatar isn't a shithole, it isn't a good example.
Sorry my dude but all your points just look like a lot of whig history to me.
I will get my wife's boyfriend to flog me as punishment tonight.
