Autocracy is one way to organize towards a goal, but since it's very narrow in its field of view, eventually it falls apart from the inside, because it can't balance the interests of the whole with the interests of its constituents individually.

A stable system has fractal stability as you go deeper. You can't make a car go faster than its parts can withstand before they fall apart. Even if you press the pedal really strongly.

Democracy is indeed a compromise - we cripple synchronization at a macro level, so that we get to enjoy some individual freedoms. But it also results in hidden structures of control, like corporations growing so large within a "free market" that they start buying power, and this feeds a cycle of autocracy that is even more toxic than the ideological kind, as it's entirely driven by the profit motive.

So essentially, we first need to escape the false dichotomy of autocracy vs democracy and think what transcendent paradigm includes positive elements of both, and some novel ones, but it includes less drawbacks from each. And I think we can mine nature and software architectures for inspiration, as they're rich with working models we haven't even tried yet at a social level.

But I don't think we're moving towards that. We just wobble between anarchy and fascism and somewhere in the middle is what we call "normal" (but ain't).