Ok, so one good thing about totalitarianism is that decisions can be made fast.
Comment on Totalitarianism. What are the good things about it?
Bye@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Single best form of government, if and only if your autocrat is highly competent and selfless. In other words, it’s an awful form of government.
Decisions can be made very fast though, this is why most governments have a mechanism by which they temporarily become somewhat autocratic (martial law, appointing a chancellor, etc). Note that this has been very bad when not temporary.
dope@lemm.ee 9 months ago
GreyShuck@feddit.uk 9 months ago
Why is that a good thing? It would only be good if the results of the decisions were good. Making bad decisions fast would make things worse.
Decision speed is simply neutral unless there is an associated bias towards good or bad results from those decisions.
dope@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Because, all other things being equal, getting where you want to go, quicker, is generally considered to be a good thing.
GreyShuck@feddit.uk 9 months ago
So that would only be ‘good’ from the point of view of your totalitarian ruler themselves. It doesn’t say anything about whether it is good or bad for anyone else. And - critically - only good as long as your ruler was actually competent enough to get to where they wanted to get to in the most efficient way. If they were not going to be taking opposing views into account they would have to be universal experts.
HipPriest@kbin.social 9 months ago
What if they realised they'd made a very stupid decision and if there'd been some more checks and balances that decision could have been avoided?
The Third Reich, I think we can all agree was totalitarian. Hitler wanted to plunge into a war on two fronts against the USSR drunk on victory against France and expecting to beat Britain. Most of his military advisors weren't keen. But being a Dictator he could just do it and hey presto war against Stalin. As time went on he got more erratic, made more random millitary decisions overruling his generals and made a pigs ear of things but whatever decision he made on a whim happened straight away anyway.
That's just a famous and obvious example of a totalitarian leader rushing into things and getting where he wanted to go faster which didn't end well for the leader.
frankPodmore@slrpnk.net 9 months ago
It’s not true that decisions can’t be made quickly by democratic governments. There are truly thousands of counter examples, but to take a single one, in the COVID-19 pandemic, many democratic governments took rapid decisions. Some of these decisions n turned out badly and some well, which provides a second stumbling block to your thesis: decisions taken quickly can be bad as well as good.
Secondly, it’s not true that totalitarian regimes act quickly. There’s a governmental bottleneck of the ruler and his clique. If they’re not paying attention to a given issue at a given time, decisions can’t be taken at all, making for less efficient governance. And, in practice, such decisions as are taken are often not implemented: you end up with rune-reading and kremlinology by officials trying to work out what an order ‘really’ meant, or whether it really was an order, because there’s no clear method for governing other than ‘Do what the leader said’.
I appreciate, by the way, that you’re making a devil’s advocate argument, here. Just wanted to explain why it’s wrong, as OP seems pretty disposed to believe the devil!