Democracy is dangerous. Just ask Boris. Just ask Jeremy Corbyn.

But we’ve been surprised at its power in the last week or so. Democracy is often given three unthinking cheers in liberal countries, not the two modest cheers E. M. Forster advised. Hence the referendum was originally welcomed as the pinnacle of democratic freedom: everyone’s vote counts. But maybe democracy’s power will make the poor poorer and plunge the UK into decades of existential crisis.

Or perhaps, longer term, it will prove wise: maybe we’ll be glad to be free of the vices of the EU and folly of the euro. Who knows. So crystal balls aside, what might the shock of our revolution remind us about the political system that we’re seeing so powerfully shape us?

There are dangers acknowledged from the first by its inventors, the ancient Athenians. Aristotle called democracy “the most friendly” constitution, when it works, though it was democracy that killed his mentor, Socrates, and caused him to flee Athens and die abroad when the people turned against him too.

The key element the Athenians stressed is that democracy is not about the individual, but the collective. The very word means power to the people – a collective noun – and people en masse routinely and readily become a frightening force. Think of the global leader with, I think, the biggest democratic mandate: Putin in Russia. And he could soon be set against Trump.

So the Athenians cultivated remedies to check the risks of group think. The most startling was ostracism. Every few years, a rising political star was sent into exile. They were cast out, no appeals allowed. It was a safeguard with twofold intent.

One was to protect the polis from demagogues, individuals who through force of rhetoric threatened to play the crowd and unleash its darker energies. Second, ostracism was to discourage demagogic designs: the ruthless threat of losing everything as deterrent.

It wasn’t a perfect solution. They don’t exist. Two cheers for democracy – though today, we’d feel it simply too harsh, unfair on Boris, even Farage. Perhaps that needs a rethink.

After all, ostracism was itself a democratic process. It wasn’t exercised at the whim of rulers, to get rid of unwanted opponents. It was an act of political responsibility. Better a vote than newspapers, who are sometimes said to do our ostracizing for us?

A second crucial containment of ancient democracy was the theatre, and the Dionysian festival of tragedies in particular. The heart-rending plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles, exposing the horrors of war, love and tyranny, were an astonishing exercise in self-perception. The opposite of spin and doggy dossiers, they were a collective exercise in emotional intelligence.

We still get a taste of them when, say, solemnly remembering the one million slaughtered in the Somme. One million. How many cheers for democracy?

Perhaps in our two cheers today, a possible improvement in our experiment, compared with our forebears’, might be highlighted. Universal education.

Research on groups suggests that when groups are diverse in terms of their opinions, and can tolerate sharing that diversity; when groups offer the kind of belonging that means members want to serve the others, as a team; and when groups are focused on wider interests, not just the self-interests of the group – then they can prove very smart indeed, becoming an intelligent collective that’s wiser than the brightest loner.

As people of the polis, what’s required is an education, in Plato’s sense – to build emotional intelligence: trust in life, comfort with oneself, recognition of limits.

And that last bit is key. Knowledge is not something we posses. It’s discovered. It’s not our property, but belongs to the gods. Fate always haunts us. Though, if we look, we’re also always offered glimpses of the good, the promise of hope. Here’s a cheer for that too.