(08-27-2022, 07:07 PM)JasonBlack Wrote:(08-27-2022, 09:13 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: One of the dangers to a despotic regime in modern times is that it needs a neurotic split between technological competence to support productivity to make a potent war machine, have seductive propaganda, and mollify people with a consumer economy while keeping people numbed on political issues. Thus for a modern economy it needs an educated workforce but people unwilling to challenge the numbing reality of the police terror, bureaucratic hierarchy, and numbing politics. An attempt to modify the order (think of Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika) to be more democratic is to bring to question the need for the political apparatus of the System.
If Founding Fathers of the United States said that a nation could not be both ignorant and free and supported mass education simply to make democracy viable, a sophisticated populace might be incompatible with a dictatorship. Authoritarian and totalitarian regimes that began with a generally well-educated populace had to degrade education to an elementary level except on technical skills, which explains such disparate tyrannies in Nazi Germany, Communist Czechoslovakia, Castro's Cuba, Pinochet's Chile, and Putin's Russia. Tyrannies that began with a largely-illiterate populace (Soviet Russia, Mao's China, Apartheid-era South Africa [for blacks]. Libya under Qaddafi, and Iraq under Saddam Hussein, promoted mass programs of literacy but made sure that people could not do subtle thought.
Even a study so apolitical as mathematics, mechanical entineering, or agronomy requires rational thought, and rational thought easily detects the inadequacies of fascism, Marxism-Leninism, and systemic racism. Tyranny depends heavily upon the argument of the appeal to fear (as in, obey the Ayatollahs or die horribly), but this fear degrades life -- and people know this well.
So far as I can tell, all tyranny entails contradictions which the system can never resolve. Government responsive to the People through free elections that accepts a free-wheeling intellectual life is far more competent at facilitating the creativity that underpins the economy of intellectual property (and the most advanced societies have it as a big player in the economy) of the post-industrial world. Orwell sees the ideal person to the tyrannical and exploitative order of his nightmarish Oceania as someone who can hold two contradictory ideas at the same time and see nothing wrong with that. Just consider that even in the United States, the communities that depend heavily upon intellectual activity for their active economies are less likely to support Donald Trump, and the people with the silly MAGA hats seem highly uncreative and unimaginative.
Contradictions do not harmonize; they conflict, and their conflicts often result in horrific conflicts in purges and wars. Something as basic as mathematics often resolves a question by establishing that the opposite idea is incompatible with more basic knowledge within mathematics.
This is all correct, but this it's largely coming from the perspective of human rights, quality of life, psychological health, etc. The stats I'm sharing here are more....this is why China will not exist in any recognizable form within the decade.
This fits my bias in favor of human rights, quality of life, psychological health, etc. Of course I have a strong bias against tyranny in any form no matter how glorious the cause that supposedly justifies the brutality. .
It is relatively easy to get material productivity by literally cracking the whip, as slave-owners well knew. This is obviously so in a brute-force economy in which physical effort is everything and more subtle inducements are unavailable. Nobody willingly gives a greater effort when that effort will result in no tangible benefit for him. Nobody wishes to work to a life-endangering pace with the danger of injury that will result in his abandonment to starvation.
Note also that this is also not how to get any achievement that depends upon creativity or imagination. Economic rewards, good feelings about oneself, and the approval of others all serve better with lesser harm to the person ... and far more happiness. Threats work on people near the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It's easy to motivate field hands at the plantation Tara (Gone With the Wind) with the lash or its threat while consistently failing to recognize the humanity of the slave. It is not so possible to beat an adman into coming up with a successful jingle, and it is clear that a Mozart composes great music because such is the character of Mozart.
Somewhere in between is the reality of most lives in our world at one point or another, the political and administrative culture best described as the velvet glove covering the mailed fist. Such is excellent for stifling dissent; people know enough to hold it in, put it into some well-guarded diary, or believe that anything less than unswerving obedience to the repressive order is insane or impossible. Supposedly the KGB had part of its training the showing film of a man being loaded alive into a furnace as a warning to anyone who would betray the KGB. Was the immolation real or fabricated? It is not known.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.