When is authoritarianism appropriate and when is it not?
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Democracy is not automatically “good”. Democracy is a tool. When applied in an appropriate way and to an appropriate voter base (one informed and smart enough to, on average, make a correct vote), it’s a great decision-making tool. It also has the ability to empower a larger number of people, which has real tangible benefits. When applied in an inappropriate way… well just look around. Most liberal democracies have just become a pay-to-win competition for the mega-rich to launder their dictatorship though.
I say this as someone who has designed and run democratic projects, and someone who is generally pro-democracy, yet against most existing “democratic countries”.
It’s also important to note historical cases like the 1917 October Revolution, where there became an interesting question of whether a liberal democracy was more important than putting power in the hands of the working class - the second option was closer to the goals of an ideal democracy, despite appearing to be an anti-democratic authoritarian seizure of power. Consider alternative cases, like democracies which have allowed right-wing authoritarians to legally gain large amounts of power (e.g. Hitler, Trump) and whether it was more important to preserve a malfunctioning liberal democracy or to prevent a harmful regime taking over.
These gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves.
You need both. Democracy and authoritarianism. Democracy so the people rule, and authority so it stays that way.
It’s a matter of circumstance. Authoritarianism is only useful in situations where time pressures make the slow, deliberate decisions of democracy unworkable. Combat is a good example of this. When the shells are raining down around you, there isn’t really time to hold a vote on how to proceed. So, in such situations there is usually a chain of command which is given authoritarian control. Other emergent situations will also often require similar levels of top-down control. The person in charge may not make the best or fairest decisions in the heat of the moment. But, inaction will almost certainly be a worse choice.
The other side of this is, when the situation isn’t emergent, a democratic (well, really semi-democratic, but I’m going to use “democratic”) system is likely the best choice. And those democratic systems would be wise to prepare for the emergent situations by identifying and designating the people who will be handed dictatorial control when the fecal matter hits the air circulator. And the system for identifying when the emergency has ended, how dictatorial power is unwound and how the performance of the person handed that power is to be judged.
The reason I hedged with “semi-democratic” is that a truly democratic system can have issues too. The classic “tyranny of the majority” problem. As any majority could override the rights of a minority in a truly horrible fashion. The solution being things like constitutional democracies, where the power of the majority is limited in specific ways (e.g. unrevokable rights).
Autocracy is a toin coss, which makes the idea itself naive.
Democracy is always the answer. Mass influence by algorithm needs to be outlawed immediately.
So far, base democracy in highly federated systems is the fairest I’ve seen. Sadly, fairness isnt the measurement our world evonomy goes by. That needs to change.
Scale is the factor here. You could say that small places can benefit from a sort of benevolent authoritarianism. I’m thinking Singapore, Liechtenstein, Monaco. None of them are bigger than a postage stamp and the population will go along with it. The bigger the country, the more injustices authoritarianism accumulates, the harder it is to keep people in line, the more suppressive it becomes.
Ideally, democracy trumps everything. It is the only system that has the built-in power to cancel itself. It needs all the people to be aware and to participate accordingly. It’s not perfect. It’s not always fair either. But I’d rather live in a system that can decide to end itself than in a system that would try to end me if I wanted to be critical about it.
Autocracy is convenient when the leader is wise and just. Sadly, even if we found one, they’re not genetic traits. Democracy is convenient in any other case, but it’s harder to properly implement compared to autocracy.
Maybe we could invent a high-quality autocrat.
Perfect genetics, perfect upbringing and education. A mega-brahmin kinda thing.
Or with brain chips. A dozen suboptimal autocrats, networked together to make a more ideal autocrat.
Or an AI. Feed it with everything and then ask it policy questions.
No, friend, those people are forged by life, not bred. But if we all had a higher floor (ideologically - ethically), some of us could reach higher ceilings.
I think the brain-chip network deviates from your heroic portrayal actually.
Democracy is never appropriate.
We need socialism.
But who’s gonna run it? SocialismAI?
A board elected by a soviet, which is run autonomously and picks representatives based on local, popular vote
Democracy is good when it can’t be completely subverted by a couple of rich international oligarchs spending billions of dollars in a dedicated mass media campaign over a period of decades that beams a literal firehose of lies, half-truths, and the glazing of any person/organization that willingly assists them and does everything in their power to destroy and denigrate anything that even comes close to undermining them at the cost of factual reality directly into the eyeballs of anyone who owns a screen…
But other than that democracy is generally preferred, yes.
So you’re just asking when is it okay for you to give up being a part of society and giving total control to the fascists?
Because the answer, literally every time, is going to be “never.” You should never give in to authoritarianism. You should actively make it harder for “them” to bring you and anyone else down like this. You should be working harder to uplift your neighbors and communities.
What if it’s an authority that you trust, like a doctor?
Is authoritarianism good then?
that’s neither authority nor authoritarianism. you’re conflating multiple different meanings so you can shift the goalposts on the sly. a doctor can give you advice, and if you’re wise, you’ll heed it out of respect for her hard-earned expertise, but she doesn’t have authority. she isn’t empowered to force you to do anything. even being involuntarily committed is generally something done by courts, not doctors; the doctors are merely required to carry out the courts orders.
Actually they call a doctor into the court to offer expert testimony.
I think that you have a good authority and a bad authority but just call them different things to avoid awkwardness.
Democracy is only appropriate when the society in question is willing to accept the results of a democratic vote. If divisions in the society are so ingrained that this doesnt happen, then democracy doesn’t work.
Society should exist for the sole purpose of bettering the lives of all of its members. Anything that goes against that is inappropriate in my book. Right now democracy is going against that pretty hard in the US.
Democracy is always good except if what is put to a vote is whether human beings deserve rights or not. Human rights are unappealable, period.
Authoritarianism, on the other hand, is never good, and anyone who says otherwise is a bootlicker, a privileged class or an authoritarian leader.
Valid but counter point, popular vote is always easily influenceable, leading to counter productive results, and sometimes leads to psuedodemocracy which is authoritarian in all but name.
There is no good autocracy and no perfect democracy, but you cannot discredit both.
Short bursts of autocracy when necessary and done right(altruistic leader with accountability who steps down) leads to a lasting democracy
altruistic leader with accountability who steps down
That is traditional leadership, and leadership is one thing and authoritarianism is quite another.
A leader does not have to be authoritarian. A leader works best when they delegates functions and distributes power horizontally. The leader is not the one who knows more but the one who is more focused.
In authoritarianism, the despot is “the alpha and the omega”, the top of the pyramid and the highest authority, regardless of the scope. He is the one who has the last word, even if what he says is bullshit. There is no form of authoritarianism that is mild or “altruistic”.
I grant you that the population is easy to manipulate, but that is precisely because of the dependence on authority figures, people trust more in what their “leader” tells them than in their own judgment.
The solution is to educate the population so that it is less prone to manipulation, not to continue doing the same as always.
Ok. Just for conversation’s sake, here are 2 exceptions. Respectively :
Democracy is bad when addressing uncommon subjects. Because if you don’t know the subject then you shouldn’t vote on it.
Authoritarianism is good when the authority knows better than the populace.
I partially disagreed in the first and strongly disagreed in the second.
The first can be resolved with education.
The second…
The funny thing is that both points are related in a horrid way:
Let’s say there is a despot who has a doctorate, it doesn’t matter what it is, it could be in quantum physics, which has nothing to do with politics, but it is enough to say that the guy is smart. The despot proposes something based on what you say: that those who are not “properly prepared intellectually” can not vote, this translates into those who do not have a university degree can not vote, as 40% of the population at best. Then this becomes that you have to have a Master’s degree to vote, then a doctorate, then only if you have a doctorate in a specific field, and so on…
On the one hand, we should not limit the exercise of democracy of the population, on the contrary. The population does not know how to read? Teach them, they don’t know arithmetic? Teach them. The vast majority do not have a university degree? Make university access more accessible, in an intelligent transforming way.
On the other hand, don’t give unlimited power to ANYONE. There is no individual being capable of providing a whole society with what it needs, because this individual will act according to his limited vision of the world and this will lead to the misfortune of the groups that escape his worldview. And that is only assuming that the despot really wants to “do what is best for all”, which is not at all the case in reality. The despots from the beginning choose a side (“Us”, the Aryans, etc) and an enemy (“Them”, the Jews, the blacks, the Latinos, the non-Aryan whites, etc), and openly act to harm “them” and only benefit “us”. And this is how genocides and so on happen…
The first can be resolved with education.
Can, could, would, should… fact is if they don’t understand the subject then they don’t understand the subject. We aren’t going to put off the vote on the new dam till everybody gets their civil engineering degree. So no.
The funny thing is that both points are related in a horrid way:
They are literally the same situation from 2 different sides.
On the other hand, don’t give unlimited power…
But we do. We give power to a hundred specialists. They know their subject, we don’t, so we trust them to do the right thing. Every day we do that. Running our society seems like more of the same.
We are not going to postpone the vote on the new dam until everyone gets their civil engineering degree.
If the specialist cannot explain to the common population in a concise way the implications of carrying out a project of that size so that they can make a sensible choice in a vote, then the problem lies with the specialist, not the population. Giving that kind of explanation is education.
We empower a hundred specialists.
That is not at all the same as giving absolute authority to a despot. A specialist is not necessarily an authority, just as in most cases authorities are not specialists.
You could say that a doctor has the power over who lives and who dies, but what if the hospital director fires the doctor? Or demands that he give priority to some patients over others? And hospital directors are not necessarily Doctors of Medicine. Sure, ideally, the specialists in a field should be the aurities in that field, but that is an ideal and not a reality. The authority of the Hospital is not the doctor, but the Hospital Director. The authority that decides whether or not to build a dam is not the Engineer, it is the owner of the construction company.
Besides, the fact that we have been giving too much power to individuals for years does not mean that it is the right thing to do! For some reason we are on the verge of a new rebirth of fascism.
If the specialist cannot explain to the common population in a concise way the implications of carrying out a project of that size so that they can make a sensible choice in a vote,
There’s no concise way to explain something complicated to a layperson that doesn’t end with “trust me, I’m the expert”.
then the problem lies with the specialist, not the population. Giving that kind of explanation is education.
Shifting the blame doesn’t make the problem disappear. Whether the population is uneducated because of a lack of qualified specialists, or simply due to being incapable of understanding the information, the outcome is the same. You still have uninformed people making decisions.
(Goddamn, are we still discussing this? Ok…)
There’s no concise way to explain something complicated to a layperson that doesn’t end with “trust me, I’m the expert”.
… So? At least with the explanation the layperson can decide if he trusts the work of the specialist, not so much on whether or not he knows how to do what he does but on how what he does will affect them. Explaining is taking the specialist’s field to the common ground, not the layperson to the specialist’s field.
Shifting the blame doesn’t make the problem disappear.
I’m not shifting the blame, I’m highlighting what I think is the real crux of the problem, of which I think you would also agree: there are far more ignorant people than wise ones. The point is that I advocate educating the ignorant, while others prefer not to allow the ignorant to do anything on their own or make decisions.
Whether the population is uneducated because of a lack of qualified specialists, or simply due to being incapable of understanding the information.
Why do you assume from the outset that there are people who “simply don’t understand”? In what sense “don’t understand”? Because they don’t want to understand or because they are idiots? And if you say that bullshit that “They don’t understand because they don’t understand!” then I’m going to assume that you are one of those who just “Don’t understand” things. I am sick and tired of such a reductionist response.
You still have uninformed people making decisions.
Ok, and what should be done about it? Leave that ignorant population and let others, supposedly more qualified, decide how they should live? Should we go back to feudalism? Let the king and the nobles decide for the commoners? Fortunately (or unfortunately) it seems that we are heading that way! with the nobles of Sillicon Valley taking control of the Technofeudos of the Internet, and the new totalitarian kings taking control in the United States, Russia, China, Turkey, Venezuela, El Salvador, etc, etc…
In what sense “don’t understand”?
In any of the senses you’ve listed or haven’t listed. My point was that the outcome of the situation doesn’t change regardless of the cause of the ignorance. What it does affect is how you address the problem.
Ok, and what should be done about it?
A start would be acknowledging the existence of a problem so that we can start looking for a solution. I’ve been thinking about this for a while and what I think would be nice is if we had something akin to a direct democracy where people could vote on the areas where they are experts. For most people, that would be their own lives and the problems they face, so they essentially vote on what problems to fix rather than how to fix them. Let the experts take care of figuring out how to do the fixing. There’s still the problem of how to find good subject experts in domains where you’re not an expert yourself and keeping them accountable. I don’t have a good answer for those right now.
The ability to explain the subject to the uneducated is not something we generally expect in our engineers. What we do is trust their judgment. That’s how we do it when building dams, bridges, houses etc.
Oh now it’s a question of right.
Like talking to a puddle of squishy goo.
Gotta disagree on the authoritarianisms. Millionaires have consistently been shit at running countries. All of them run the country like a business, where citizens are workers that can’t be fired and very few are able to quit. They also always play the cards to favour their “friends”, dragging the society towards kleptocracy.
A dentist is a pretty good authority. So’s a plumber. There are a hundred more examples we could cite.
Are we saying that running the country is an exceptional case?
A dentist has no authority over you. If you choose not to brush your teeth they can’t force you to, they can’t do dental work unless you willingly seek them put and consent.
A plumber has not authority to enter your home or mess with your plumbing unless you invite them in.
You’re misusing the word “authority” and applying it out of context.
We confer power to the dentist and the plumber because the dentist and the plumber are experts in their fields.
We confer power to our other authorities, political and otherwise, for similar reasons.
That’s how authority works.
What? Take the discussion seriously.
We don’t confer power to them. I am the authority and I consent to the dentist cleaning my teeth but the second I say “no” their ability to operate is taken away.
Try telling “no” to a cop trying to arrest you.
Not serious? Well argue with yourself then.
When is justice appropriate?
I don’t understand. What are you saying?
Authoritarianism is fundamentally unjust as a form of government.
Even asking that question is borderline bad faith.
All forms of government are “Authoritarian”.
Authoritarianism is preferred when the authority understands the subject better than the populace. Right?
Keep licking that boot and maybe you’ll be last up against the wall.
You evaded my question.
I’m asking why you’re defending authoritarianism and all I see is Sealioning.
You are clearly sealioning about sealioning.
