I think when people want democracy bad enough they're willing to violently overthrow those trying to control them, it is by default time to make the switch
I find the relevance or irrelevance of literacy to be an interesting topic. I recognize that literacy has very little to do with intelligence, but it's still an eye opening experience to live within cultures with very low literacy rates.
The mother of my ex-wife (who grew up in the Chinese countryside) could not read or write, but was a moderately successful businesswoman by countryside standards. She managed to make about $30,000 per year in a place where the average was less than $1,000 per year. She was very street smart, obviously of high intelligence, and very dependent on relationship based leverage to make her sales due to the fact that she couldn't read a contract or understand the details of how business law works. Even if she did, the police in the area didn't exactly place a high priority on enforcing such things unless there was something in it for them and, incidentally, an uncle of hers was the police chief. Within her own world, she did well. She had very little understanding of how things worked outside of that world, even within her own country. Once we had to take one of my ex-wife's sisters to a hospital in Shanghai, about three hours away, for more advanced treatment than was available in the countryside. Her parents couldn't even communicate with the doctors, and either my ex-wife or I had to help with the translation. In countries with extremely low literacy rates (pre Mao Ze Dong China), spoken dialects drift apart rapidly. My ex-wife and even the Shanghai doctor belonged to a different, more educated era. They spoke standard Mandarin Chinese as well as their local dialects. The older generation was by default isolated within their own communities. Mao Ze Dong, as controversial as he might have been, took one very critical step in his attempt to unify China. He took the Beijing dialect and made that the national language, and then eventually made the learning of that language, both spoken and written, mandatory. Prior to this, states were connected via educated government officials, and the idea of a democratic form of government where all but a few had the power to make decisions for the majority would have been laughable. Now that this older generation is fading and the literate, not smarter but more educated younger generation is taking its place, the desire for Democracy has started to grow rapidly. The government will, little by little, have to make concessions and compromises if it wants to avoid civil war.
My other experience was in Afghanistan. I had contact with Taliban prisoners who were, for the most part, completely illiterate. At first I couldn't help but find it almost amusing how they would make what they thought were clever quotes from the Koran in order to justify their actions, not realizing that their quotes weren't even in the Koran. Their perspective of their religion was based largely on word of mouth and their own isolated culture. And to be fair, this phenomenon is far from being restricted to radical Muslims. People who lack the ability to read and write are at a severe disadvantage in regards to the ability to accurately pass on information (think of the game "Telephone"), yet for some reason still hold just as strongly to their beliefs as some other group that might have heard the information just a little differently. To draw a parallel, consider ongoing debates over the meaning and intent of the U.S. Constitute, a document from which we all at least have the advantage of starting with the same wording. We can't even settle on the meaning and intent of the term "right to bear arms," for example. Now imagine for a second that there is no written constitution and that we're just going by word of mouth, and that we've all heard different versions of that constitution, AND that we're interpreting those different versions differently. Let's also imagine that an issue came up that needed to be voted on that related to these debated rights, but again we couldn't read and interpret that issue with our own eyes, and instead had to rely on the words of someone who more than likely has an agenda. We can still make our way to the poll and vote, but is it really Democracy if no one really has any idea what they're voting about and no understanding of the government they fall under?
I don't know what my solution is though. I didn't really start with the intent of making an important point, I just started typing stuff.
The tactical advantages of spreading one's own form of government is only partly due to a desire to see everyone "free." There isn't a country in this world that doesn't have some kind of agenda, and whether that agenda is good or not, it's easier to see it through when there are other countries who see things the way you do. Spreading Democracy is just another possible move in a big game of chess.
