Democracies hinge on individual votes—millions of personal decisions shaped by each voter’s fears, hopes, and responsibilities. Your vote reflects your unique character, life experiences, and cultural influences, forming your worldview.

Worldviews are the foundation for understanding yourself, others, and society’s collective mentality. Every worldview is an integrated web of values, beliefs, and character traits.

Like every person, your worldview has two dimensions:

Inward: it encompasses your self-sense of certainty, stability, confidence, and doubt.
Outward: it shapes your understanding of how the world works, what you need from it, and what you want for it.

To understand why voters choose between democratic and autocratic leadership, we must first understand how individuals develop their sense of self. The essays in Puzzle II examine the diverse factors that shape how your worldview contributes to your life choices.

While personal development can take many paths—some adaptive, others maladaptive—I will focus on routes that lead to positive personal power and purpose, as well as those paths leading to maladaptive outcomes.

By exploring how people develop their unique and personalized worldviews, we gain deeper insight into the complex forces driving individual choices between democratic and autocratic governance.