The government likes to pretend that it's there for the people and by the people. That the government serves the people. But many people know that this isn't actually true.
A lot of people do believe it though. Even the ones who don't believe it still go out and vote anyways and keep everything going round in circles to keep this system going that doesn't work.
It's a fable, a fable that they do what people want. But they are actually listening to what people want. Otherwise there would be different outcomes to certain things. Things like lockdowns and restrictions and mandates being imposed on people.
And even what people want is largely influenced by what they're told, the information that people receive will influence their behavior and actions.
If you sell people fear of something, and their only source of information is you providing it, then they are going to believe what you're telling them in fear what you tell them to fear. The sources being the media that propagates what the government says and sells the same official narrative.
But if you could get information from other sources, which people seem to be too lazy to do, seemingly blindly trusting centralized corporate media to provide them with accurate information alone, as if any other information is dubious and false if it contradicts what the corporate centralized media tells them. But if you could get this information from other sources, then you be less prone to being manipulated and that in the direction that the centralized corporate media forces are leading you towards.
Let's take an example conducted by a centralized media company in Canada, CTV news, which conducted a poll on November 29, 2021 asking people if they think more restrictions are needed to slow the spread of the omicron variant
https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/mobile/community/polls
Now it's true that this polling size was not very large, at a total of 6000 people, but it is representative of people who tune into this centralized corporate media. Even they don't want restrictions and don't think omicron poses a threat that wants restrictions, even if they believe in the whole narrative.
Some people do want more restrictions, but the majority don't.
So back to the original issue, does the government actually represent the people? Do the majority of people actually get listened to by government?
I would say that the answer is no. Most people didn't want what the government did, such as forcing the shutdown of businesses under a false pretext of the most deadly virus, akin to Ebola, worse than the flu pandemic of 1918. Fear sold it to many, and the government's monopoly on violence imposed these restrictions on people.