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> you get fed deceptive information by your local officials > you have the power to enforce city-scale quarantines rather effectively. These two things cannot
by aeturnum 7y ago
> you get fed deceptive information by your local officials
> you have the power to enforce city-scale quarantines rather effectively.
These two things cannot possibly both be true, which is why people are skeptical that authoritarian regimes are good at this kind of thing. If you can't trust what your officials are telling you, you can't organize and maintain a quarantine, an effort that requires detailed coordination to keep the quarantined area well-supplied enough to avoid most escape attempts.
This is not to say that democracies are "good" at it, just that the idea that authoritarian regimes can actually control their people any more than democracies can is mostly a fantasy.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- karatestomp 7y ago> If you can't trust what your officials are telling you, you can't organize and maintain a quarantine, an effort that requires detailed coordination to keep the quarantined area well-supplied enough to avoid most escape attempts. That's part of what contributed to various failures explored (I do not know how accurately) by the HBO Chernobyl series. Punish truth and reward lies, and you're bound to end up with fragile systems that can't be efficiently fixed or otherwise addressed when they fall apart, in part because information can't be trusted. [EDIT] notably it also explores the benefits of authoritarianism: when The System finally decides people who can fix the problem should have what they need to fix it, by god, they'll get it.