8 ms·

In the West we have a false sense of security that totalitarianism will inevitably fail. We've seen so many examples of fallen tyrannical states. But many ide

• oblio 8y ago
  One could argue that “totalitarianism” was the default government form for most of history. The problem is, the higher we go on the Maslow pyramid, the more likely it is for it to fail. You just can’t have a huge mass of creative, inventive people without them complaining about leadership (and wanting to improve it). And totalitarianism by definition has problems accepting criticism. The only way for totalitarianism to “work” is if the rulers are both much smarter than the population as a whole and also benevolent. Regarding China, let’s see. These kinds of regimes don’t fail immediately. Just the cracks get bigger and bigger. From what I heard there’s a consolidation of power going on, that’s generally a sure sign of the first cracks appearing.
  • s4vi0r 8y ago
    The amount of protests in China has been exploding over the past decade(s). I didn't even know until someone mentioned it on here a few months back, but iirc its gone from maybe a few thousand per year in the 90s to well over 100,000 in recent years. The Chinese rich I've interacted with are also (in my experience, at least - I don't have stats to support this) really ignorant of how bad a lot of their countrymen have it. A friend of mine's father is some sort of government official in a tier 1 or 2 city, and he's told me that the rich and poor are segregated enough that he himself didn't even realize his family was anything other than middle class until he came to Canada and saw it wasn't exactly normal to have parents who can afford 100k+ annual tuition, luxury cars and apartments, etc.
  • cf498 8y ago
    >The only way for totalitarianism to “work” is if the rulers are both much smarter than the population as a whole and also benevolent. I dont think thats realistic anymore. Once they are able to hit first and hit hard when opposition forms, they are pretty much untouchable. The whole argument, of autocratic regimes having a higher chance of collapsing the longer the reign looks like a naive outdated approach to me. It bets on a critical mass of opposition forming. With total surveillance this wont happen. A successful mass protest has to start somewhere. If you arrest those first people willing to risk everything you quell the entire thing. Its the basic concept of 1984. The only thing holding back this dystopia was the lack of a big brother state with sufficient insight.
    • pram 8y ago
      We had many totalitarian, mass surveillance states collapse practically overnight less than 30 years ago.
      • cf498 8y ago
        There mass surveillance back then was child's play in comparison what is possible today. There is a tipping point which is hopefully still in the future, where dissent is detectable and predictable enough that regimes are no longer at risk to collapse. If you look at collapses of authoritarian regimes due to public pressure, they happen to a similar pattern. A small group of people start a protest and depending on how hated the regime is and how bad the living condition for most people are, others will join in, the more the less likely it becomes for them to be individually picked out. This only works if the initial small group has enough time to motivate enough people to join in so that it snowballs. Earlier approaches were to minimize the time the small groups had to snowball with quick and hard actions, but with more and more surveillance, it becomes possible to target people even before they join. At a certain point it becomes possible to watch over every last citizen and target anyone who might be willing to start something like this in the future.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  • robocat 8y ago
    > You just can’t have a huge mass of creative, inventive people without them complaining about leadership (and wanting to improve it). You create an upper middle class for the "creatives" and you restrict the areas of creativity to military and industrial use. Most well off people that I know are happy to think the poor deserve to be poor and repressed (different people have different reasons for justifying it. Few seen to really care).
  • em3rgent0rdr 8y ago
    > "only way for totalitarianism to “work” is if the rulers are both much smarter than the population as a whole" The party can pick the smart people from population to join.
    • siidooloo 8y ago
      That didn’t work for the USSR, why would it work for China? As long as some things are off limits / as long as people know they arn’t alowed to research this or that, then they’ll be at a long term disadvantage to those that do. China was here before. Cutting yourself off from the world just means you eventually find yourself having fallen behind everyone else.
      • kinsomo 8y ago
        > That didn’t work for the USSR, why would it work for China? The CCP does have the benefit of learning from the failures of the Soviets. > China was here before. Cutting yourself off from the world just means you eventually find yourself having fallen behind everyone else. That mainly happened because they were so dominant in their sphere that they didn't bother themselves with far off areas that seemed primitive to them. I'm pretty sure the CCP has learned from that mistake.
        • siidooloo 8y ago
          If they had learned from that mistake they wouldn’t be trying to wall the internet off.
          • kinsomo 8y ago
            > If they had learned from that mistake they wouldn’t be trying to wall the internet off. They're walling off foreign political ideas and avenues for domestic political organization, not foreign technological advancements. They are very explicit about that. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/world/asia/chinas-new-leadership-takes-hard-line-in-secret-memo.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/world/asia/chinas-new-lea...
  • robocat 8y ago
    > You just can’t have a huge mass of creative, inventive people without them complaining about leadership (and wanting to improve it). You could split a country economically into a wealthy economic zone and a zone for the working class. Or you could have a wealthy country that helps another country to be totalitarian, for the right economic gains.
  • siidooloo 8y ago
    Nothing is forever. The current regime in China won't be forever either. The question is how long. After Augustus Rome still had a couple of hundred years of expansion where a nationalist could argue, “hey look at that! Things are still going good.” But they couldn’t outrun the rot in the system forever. After Xi will China get another strongman? I think this is the key. If there are a series of total dictators things will decay. Whatever justifications a dictator uses for their rules, ultimately they are going to try to implement policies that keep themselves on top first.
    • pm90 8y ago
      This is a great point. Xi is a strongman dictator and has arguably harmed Communist rule a lot more than he realizes by eliminating term limits. If the next ruler is some fool who cannot handle the crises that a country inevitably faces... it could lead to the country's undoing. Which is why I am personally a lot more alarmed at the current US Presidency than most of my peers. Inept rulers have historically been the best predictors of a civilization's downfall. The fervent opposition to the administration by ordinary US citizens gives me hope but if Republicans continue to hold on to power after November, I really do feel that all will be lost.
  • threatofrain 8y ago
    It's one thing to invoke Abraham Maslow for aesthetic purposes during flowery discussion, but Maslow isn't followed much or at all by current researchers.
    • oblio 8y ago
      I can’t say I follow modern economics too closely, but does anyone really dispute that the need for food is a lower level one than the need for academic achievements, for example?
  • kazagistar 8y ago
    Do we actually need creative inventive people? Maybe at some point we run low on truly innovative new ideas that are truly practical. Maybe we just start re-skinning the old ideas and selling them for no real benefit, and could do without the whole process. Maybe that's already in the process of happening.
    • oblio 8y ago
      Basic research needs those people. And in the end they win. That’s how we got the alphabet, iron working, etc.
• Laforet 8y ago
  I very much doubt it is sustainable. The cost of policing is quite substantial and the productivity lost is hard to replace which adds to the cost. What we are seeing today is essentially a low intensity conflict[0] not unlike what took place in white Rhodesia/Namibia, Northern Ireland during the troubles, etc. There is a economic reason why these conflicts could not last indefinitely, no matter what ideologies drive them. [0]:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_intensity_conflict https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_intensity_conflict
  • robotkdick 8y ago
    I totally agree. China seems to want to create a monoculture with norms that don't bend from locale to locale. I think the saying is: if it don't bend, it will break.
    • slowburning 8y ago
      http://read.gov/aesop/011.html http://read.gov/aesop/011.html The Oak and the Reeds, Aesop 'Better to yield when it is folly to resist, than to resist stubbornly and be destroyed.'
  • guelo 8y ago
    If technology is able to repress resistance in more powerful ways than was previously possible then things like Northern Ireland won't be possible.
    • peteretep 8y ago
      > then things like Northern Ireland Northern Ireland (in the 1900s) was less about resistance to a tyrannical state, and much more about a population split 50/50ish who had hated each other for a few hundred years. British action there was far from exemplary, but had the people of Northern Ireland woken up one day to find they were part of the Republic of Ireland, precisely no problems would have been solved.
  • mc32 8y ago
    I think if the state enlists and coopts a sufficient percentage of the local population, then it can work indefinitely, if the gov't provides enough in terms of basic needs. The idea of local administrative committees and youth organizations as an arm to make others toe the line is not a foreign concept to the CCP.
• imbokodo 8y ago
  The Marxist/Maoist idea of the Chinese would be that the government is just part of the superstructure on top of the base. The base being the current state of the forces of production in their continual self-evolution and reinvention, and the relations of production flowing from that. In other words, the economic system determines the political system. When hunter-gatherers became farmers, the political system changed. When farming as the center made way for manufacturing and industry, the political system changed (as did culture). I don't see this as much different than Americans driving Lakota onto the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. Just two years ago the US federal government arrested and injured many on that reservation. Or Americans driving Vietnamese onto strategic hamlets. Or locking Japanese up in the 1940s. I don't see what innovation the Chinese have made.
  • amaccuish 8y ago
    You're being downvoted because what you've said is an inconvenient truth for a lot of Americans it seems.
    • s2g 8y ago
      also because it's whataboutism containing references to things widely regarded as stains on American history.
      • StellarTabi 8y ago
        You're never allowed to mention anything bad that's ever happened in the West, that's whataboutism. Randomly bringing up extremist scenarios like Mao's genocide of landlords or Stalin's gulags to prematurely shut down moderate pro-left discussions like "let's make healthcare a little more socialized in the US"? That's not whataboutism™.
• nicodjimenez 8y ago
  You've hit the nail on the head. But I think there are two separate issues at play here. The first issue is the re-writing of the social contract that can only be done by implementing mass surveillance. This approach is arguably justifiable and gives the government more control to optimize how things work. The second issue is having one party government where there is not opposition. To me this approach is definitely dangerous long term. Complete tyranny is fantastic when you have a great dictator, however there's just no evidence that this model is sustainable. If China gets too crazy, the best and brightest will want to leave the country. It's definitely a crazy and bold experiment and it's definitely working in the short term.
• adventured 8y ago
  There are good reasons to believe China's situation is in fact quite unique among totalitarian concepts and very difficult to replicate. China's situation represents a very complex, multi-generational cultural-political totalitarianism, and it required a unique context economically for it to occur. I've never seen another nation come even remotely close to replicating what it takes to set that up. Take Turkey for example, under Erdoğan. Let's say he is, or wants to be, a traditional dictator. He's probably gone in 10 or 20 years due to age. His regime ends with him, very likely, because there's no broad cultural underpinning to his regime and legacy. That's the case in most totalitarian examples of the last century. The cultural reformations that enabled the China boom, starting with Deng Xiaoping, are being systematically rolled backwards. The economic gains from the late 1970s to ~2009, were very easy compared to the challenges that come next to continue pushing the per capita results ever higher. When you're starting from $175 GDP per capita in 1980, just about any meaningful improvement at all in the system will get you to $1,000 or $2,000 per capita. My point being, only when the tide goes out do you see who is swimming naked, to borrow a line from Warren Buffett. China's vast growth no doubt masks immense problems that only become clearer in their scope and risk as their 30 year economic expansion matures (as it is now). The people of China will tolerate a lot of things if you take them from $200 GDP per capita to $10,000. China is not going to be able to replicate that climb again, from here forward. That will have consequences, as the social contract in China requires perpetual, preferably rapid, improvement. What China has done is extraordinarily expensive. They paid for it with a unique, historically singular export machine and trade surplus and starting from a context of a near zero welfare state (diverts capital from investment & growth) and from a setup with nearly maximum economic slack (easy to fill in for decades). What other nations have anything like that setup to replicate from? Russia (fascist dictatorship, long totalitarian history) for example doesn't have that sort of extreme economic slack, its GDP per capita is already up where China is at today; the same goes for Turkey. The Russian system is mature, slow growth, with considerable existing structural financial demands that prevent the vast free use of capital as in China. China's rules today are not the same as China's rules in 1996 or 2006. Culturally they've lost a lot of the modest freedom gains that were acquired over decades, in just the last five or six years. How does that impact the ability of their economic system to continue to scale over time, as the oppression ramps up? These are two different systems - Deng vs Xi - not a continuing of the same system. Xi gets to ride on the accomplishments of the Deng revolution, including the financial capabilities it made possible. I think it's a fair question as to whether China can keep moving forward as they previously were, while simultaneously removing the Deng approach that made it all possible in the first place.
• perl4ever 8y ago
  Successful "tyranny" could be analogous to successful multicellular life. We could be witnessing a similar development in the history of life. But note that multicellular life never wiped out single cells, and in fact we live symbiotically with a large number. Plus, cancer is apparently not something that can be eliminated.
• Karishma1234 8y ago
  > In the West we have a false sense of security that totalitarianism will inevitably fail. At the height of civil war the western classical liberal democracies looked weak and near collapse while Soviet looked too strong and awesome until one day it just collapsed. It is a bubble boy vs Sewer Rat thing. The bubble boy looks extremely clean and insulated from bad things until one day it just dies of common cold. The filthy NY sewer rat however survives carrying in itself 10 different types of plagues. > China seems committed to making totalitarianism "work." We need to take a backseat and realise that American media simply does not get China, India or Japan. They are judging the world from their own spectacles which might be wrong. An average Chinese today is freerer than an average Chinese 30 years ago despite all efforts by their government. An average American today is less free than an average American 30 years ago. I am incredible hopeful for India and China in upcoming efforts. I recently spoke to a Chinese attache at local embassy. He was as ecstatic to be outside China as now he could access Youtube and Facebook. He considered his own government moves to ban these services in his country absolutely stupid and saw them as a hindrance to help China emerge as a soft power.
  • iamthirsty 8y ago
    > At the height of civil war the western classical liberal democracies looked weak and near collapse w hile Soviet looked too strong and awesome until one day it just collapsed. FYI the American Civil War ended in 1865 while the first Soviet was in 1905. And the first ~10 years after the ‘17 revolution were absolutely terrible in the Soviet Union. So your statement just isn’t correct.
    • endisukaj 8y ago
      They probably meant the Cold War.
      • s2g 8y ago
        Which doesn't make sense. At what point during the cold war was America close to collapse?
• obelix_ 8y ago
  Yup Trump, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, the 2008 meltdown, Zuckerberg turning the internet into his private sewage factory etc etc are all shining achievements of western wisdom and deep thought. The poor unimaginative illiterates of the Orient just don't get it. If only they understood what magic freedom can produce. Btw I suggest you reread your French Revolution history. The aristocracy was very much back in power within a year of the king getting his head chopped off. And then they propped up Napoloen who decided he needed to conquer the world. The next 100 years were spent with the elites of one European country or another colonising and pilaging most of South America, Africa and Asia. So much for freedom and equality and the aristocracy learning any lesson. They are still more of less in power with the same mindless global ambitions unless you haven't seen the inequality numbers and have your head buried deep in the sand.
  • siidooloo 8y ago
    Within a few decades of the French revolution half of the European governments were overthrown and replaced with constitutional Monarchies. The other half that resisted were forced into increasing totalitarianism and in a few more decades themselves overthrown in year zero revolutions. The one country to avoid this, Britain, learned the lesson of the French Revolution. They maed enough reforms that there was no constituency for revolution.
    • dragonwriter 8y ago
      > The one country to avoid this, Britain, learned the lesson of the French Revolution. They maed enough reforms that there was no constituency for revolution. Er, Britain had been a constitutional monarchy for a long time before the French Revolution, and many of the others made reforms rather than being overthrown, and in many cases, like Britain, well before the French Revolution. Your version of history is badly distorted.
      • boomboomsubban 8y ago
        Both of you are somewhat right. The various events of the late seventeenth century helped prevent revolution from popping up around the French Revolution, but their political system at the time prevented most of the country from having a role in politics. This was a wide issue in Europe, and the Revolutions of 1848 were largely about that issue. Britain had addressed that issue with the Reform Acts, allowing their government to stay stable through the period.
• madengr 8y ago
  Seems many Americans are willing to crap all over the 2nd Amendment, which is specifically in place to prevent totalitarian government.
  • krapp 8y ago
    > Seems many Americans are willing to crap all over the 2nd Amendment, which is specifically in place to prevent totalitarian government. The 2nd Amendment specifies that a well regulated militia is necessary for a free state, and that the right to keep and bear arms cannot be abridged by the Federal government. Nothing in that amendment specifically mentions the purpose of preventing totalitarian government. That's a modern interpretation, albeit one currently upheld by the Supreme Court.
    • kinsomo 8y ago
      > Nothing in that amendment specifically mentions the purpose of preventing totalitarian government. You have to take into account the context. It was written and ratified by people who'd just staged a revolution against what they described as a "tyrannical" regime, often using their own personal weapons. To note that the Constitution doesn't mention "totalitarianism" is to note that it doesn't contain an anachronism. It's a modern coinage that's not to far in meaning from "tyranny."
    • madengr 8y ago
      The entire Bill or Rights is to prevent “misconstruction and abuse of powers”.
  • kinsomo 8y ago
    > Seems many Americans are willing to crap all over the 2nd Amendment, which is specifically in place to prevent totalitarian government. Exactly. If America has learned anything from the past half century of foreign military adventures, it should be that a big modern Army can't easily defeat a motivated insurgency that has the support and sympathy in the local population. The 2nd Amendment may have a lot of costs, but the private gun ownership it provides for would definitely make it much more difficult for a domestic totalitarian regime to establish itself in the US.
• musage 8y ago
  > In the West we have a false sense of security that totalitarianism will inevitably fail. Can you point to a serious author on the subject suggesting so? For example, Hannah Arendt: > The frightening coincidence of the modern population explosion with the discovery of technical devices that, through automation, will make large sections of the population 'superfluous' even in terms of labor, and that, through nuclear energy, make it possible to deal with this twofold threat by the use of instruments beside which Hitler's gassing installations look like an evil child's fumbling toys, should be enough to make us tremble. and > Humans, in so far as they are more than a completion of functions able to react, whose lowest and therefore most central are the purely animal like reactions, are simply superfluous for totalitarian systems. Their goal is not to erect a despotic regime over humans, but a system by which humans are made superfluous. Total power can only be achieved and guaranteed when nothing else matters except the absolutely controllable willingness to react, marionettes robbed of all spontaneity. Humans, precisely because they are so powerful, can only be completely controlled when they have become examples of the animal like species human. and > We don't know a perfected totalitarian power structure, because it would require the control of the whole planet. But we know enough about the the still preliminary experiments of total organization to realize that the very well possible perfection of this apparatus would get rid of human agency in the sense as we know it. To act would turn out to be superfluous for people living together, when all people have become an example of their species, when all doing has become an acceleration of the movement mechanism of history or nature following a set pattern, and all deeds have become the execution of death sentences which history and nature have given anyway. Notice the "very well possible" in "the very well possible perfection of this apparatus would get rid of human agency in the sense as we know it". I suspect that we largely ignore this author and others not because they're too silly to even refute, but because we can't refute what they point out, and are unwilling to shoulder the responsibility that follows from that. In a nutshell, I'd say a desire for power is just a futile attempt to fill a hole that cannot be filled that way, that even makes it bigger (kinda like people rationalize and identify with the abuser out of cowardice, reaping only more cowardice in the end). But "a boot stamping on a human face, forever" isn't necessarily static. The boot can keep stamping, and the human face can keep getting infinitely thin. > Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible. -- George Orwell "if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives". That was then. Today we have great thoughts such as > One could argue that “totalitarianism” was the default government form for most of history." and > Successful "tyranny" could be analogous to successful multicellular life. We could be witnessing a similar development in the history of life. Which both actually employ the same "logic" totalitarianism does, revisionism and pseudo-science, us just adapting where history (or biology) pulls us. And then there's > a crazy and bold experiment It's a pyramid of individually weak and confused people! As much that is a simplification, "bold" doesn't belong anywhere near this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk4EspwLpzc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk4EspwLpzc Ahhh. I feel better now. When someone starts beating their spouse and kids, and starts to accuse them of more and more heinous stuff the smaller and sicker they themselves get, might one also call that a "crazy and bold experiment"? Of course not. Much less so when more people do even more of that. Totalitarianism is sociopathy and narcissism, dishonesty and violence on a mass scale. Yet here we are, it's fine to belittle it. At least "they" don't have death camps, right? And once "they" do, at least there won't be anything anyone can do. It's not about theory or history or science, and it's not about trade-offs. It's about character, which you either build or let rot; it's about about walking past a few brat kids setting a baby on fire, or doing something about it, even if it's "just" taking it seriously and taking it from there. That's more than nothing. It's a LOT more than trying to be creative about shrugging it off.
• nomass 8y ago
  Very well put and also very true. Most people are absolutely unaware how fast big shifts happen. The invention of national-socialism with the foundation of the NSDAP happened 1920. A few years later a highly weaponized and aggressive Germany invaded Poland in 1939. 19 years from zero to war.
  • pm90 8y ago
    Considering how much more technology has evolved since then, it isn't far-fetched to think that this pace of devolution into totalitarianism could happen much faster today. In fact, this is precisely what happened with ISIS. I shudder to think what might have happened if the powers to be had not put aside their differences to fight a common foe.
• ahartmetz 8y ago
  Don't ignore the different philosophical foundation of Asian societies. Confucianism is quite different from the Western line of tradition starting from the Greeks. Confucianism emphasizes community and obedience more, which is more compatible with mass surveillance.
  • woodandsteel 8y ago
    What Xi is doing is not Confucianism. Confucianism had an elaborate set of rules that everyone, from the top down, was required to follow. Xi is basically making up the rules as he goes along.
    • ahartmetz 8y ago
      We're also not exactly following Socrates and Locke here, but the balance of values we have today is influenced by them.
• cabalamat 8y ago
  > In the West we have a false sense of security that totalitarianism will inevitably fail. The West has had, for the last 200 years (and arguably for the last 500) the advantage that its economic system is better than its rivals. This is a massive, game-changing advantage. But it's not obvious to me that the West is still ahead economically -- look at China's growth rates over the last 40 years. Admittedly they are coming from behind, but because of their population they only need 1/4 of the GDP per head of the USA to be ahead on total GDP. I would say there's about a 50% possibility that China will make an authoritarianism that works, that's at least as successful economically as the West. And if that comes about it will be a real game-changer. And frankly, I don't think the West is up to the task of meeting the challenge; certainly I would not bet on Trump, Merkel, May et al doing the right thing.
• ihsw2 8y ago
  I think you overestimate the appeal of modern liberalism and the negativity of totalitarian rule.
• BurningFrog 8y ago
  I don't even agree that this is totalitarianism. Most of China does not live like this. This is mainly colonialism. The Han Chinese state is subjugating the Uighur people and taking their now strategic land.