Totalitarianism. What are the good things about it?

Submitted ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨dope@lemm.ee⁩ to ⁨[deleted]⁩

(Wikipedia) Totalitarianism is a form of government and a political system that prohibits all opposition parties, outlaws individual and group opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high if not complete degree of control and regulation over public and private life. It is regarded as the most extreme and complete form of authoritarianism.

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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.

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- 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!
  
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- dope@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Ok, so one good thing about totalitarianism is that decisions can be made fast.
  
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  - 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.
    
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BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
One benefit that hasn’t been mentioned is that it avoids the democratic issue of tyranny of the majority.

One “group” can’t just fuck over another by virtue of having more people.

Of course the benefit here assumes the leader doesn’t want to fuck over such groups. That can clearly be worse in many situations.

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- GregorGizeh@lemmy.zip ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  But this is tyranny of the minority, as in a single person or family. That’s certainly worse than the majority “dictating”
  
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  - BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Not necessarily worse. It definitely can be but it doesn’t have to.
    
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frankPodmore@slrpnk.net ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
There aren’t any.

Totalitarian regimes are fundamentally not a sensible way of organising society at any level, even if we for some reason decide to ignore the manifold human rights violations committed by totalitarian governments. There is a longheld belief that they are in some ways more ‘efficient’ than democracies (as expressed in the myth that ‘Mussolini made the trains run on time’ – he didn’t) but this isn’t true.

To take two obvious points of comparison, North Korea, the closest to a completely totalitarian regime of any country on Earth, is one of the poorest countries in the world. South Korea, a democracy, is one of the wealthiest.

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- dope@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The truth is so obvious that you cannot imagine any alternative.
  
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  - frankPodmore@slrpnk.net ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I can imagine an alternative, but the reality is that such an alternative has never arisen.
    
    The imagianry ‘good’ version of totalitarianism, I assume, is one where there’s a ‘good’ dictator who is also so intelligent they’re able to run everything very efficiently, where everyone enjoys or at least accepts the dictatorship because everything gets better for everyone. But that’s a very odd utopian daydream. In reality, being a dictator and being good are mutually incompatible.
    
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  - PeepinGoodArgs@reddthat.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I can, but totalitarianism isn’t a viable alternatives.
    
    It’s like asking me if I’m so dirty, am I so accustomed to the comfort of showers that I can’t imagine the benefits of an acid bath. Like…no, I’m not taking an acid bath regardless of how clean it makes me.
    
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PostmodernPythia@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Individuals don’t have to make their own decisions. A lot of people see that as a positive.

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- Turkey_Titty_city@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Yeah, I am shocked how many people regard exercising their autonomy as a punishment rather than a privileged, and they seem to genuinely hate it and want someone to tell them what to do with their life and what to think.
  
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  - young_broccoli@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    Yeah, I am shocked how many people regard exercising their autonomy as a punishment rather than a ~~privilege~~
    
    birthright.
    
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  - Xariphon@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I could be wrong here -- I haven't exactly done a long-term study on this -- but my impression is that the way young people are treated (in the US at least) sets people up for this. When you wake up is dictated. What you do with most of your waking hours is decided for you, without your input or slightest consideration. What you wear, what you're allowed to say, who you spend your (increasingly limited) time with and what you spend it doing and where, even the emotions you express on your face, can be dictated to you by others who consider themselves in the right to do so.
    
    This continues from before you are self-aware until nearly a decade beyond the age of abstract reasoning.
    
    By the time you're allowed to make a serious decision, others have been dictating them to you for your entire conscious life. It's no wonder people never learn how to decide for themselves. I'm reminded of Brooks from The Shawshank Redemption: institutionalized. So conditioned to having no freedom that it's terrifying rather than liberating when you finally do.
    
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- dope@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Aha! Another good thing about totalitarianism : Freedom from decision-making.
  
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  - man_in_space@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    In Alastair Reynolds’ The Prefect, this was the exact idea behind the VTs (voluntary tyrannies).
    
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TheYear2525@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
In Dune, it was used for thousands of years to build up a desire to spread, to instill a lasting distrust of leaders who would implement it, and to control the genetic trajectory of humanity in a way that would let them survive a foreseen existential threat.

In the real world, the benefits of it are for the ruler, not the populace.

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dope@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
If you definitely know what’s right, then forcing everybody to do it your way is a good thing.

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- NOT_RICK@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Your premise posits that it’s possible to have an infallible leader that always knows best. People are neither infallible nor able to always discern the best course of action. Autocracies lead to repression and stagnation given enough time.
  
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  - dope@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    What the leader was an organization of scientists?
    
    Call it a “scientific totalitarianism”. Heck, look at the recent covid thing. If we were all forced at gunpoint to mask and vax. That would be a good thing, right?
    
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- frankPodmore@slrpnk.net ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  What you’re describing here (and in the thread below) sounds a bit like technocracy, so you might be interested in reading about the Technocracy Movement.
  
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- young_broccoli@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Forcing anyone to do anything is inherently wrong.
  Also, "whats right" isnt objective.
  
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partial_accumen@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Totalitarianism - Under totalitarianism all things are good about it…because you’re not allowed to say otherwise under totalitarianism.

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gzrrt@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
You could argue that China has devolved into a totalitarian state under Xi. There's a lot of corruption surrounding the party's Ministry of Railways, which has led to some perverse incentives to invest (possibly way too much) in HSR and urban metro networks across all of the country. And thanks to the extremely centralized power structure, you have a lot of standardized components used to roll out those networks, making construction cheaper and faster due to economies of scale.

Tldr; China's rail infra is pretty great, especially when so many of its cities are very rough around the edges otherwise.

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Apepollo11@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Authenticity.

Totalitarianism is usually easy to identify. A corrupt democracy still has a veneer of legitimacy in a way that an out-and-out totalitarian regime does not.

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dope@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
It’s efficient. No fighting between a million little kings for profit and market.

Smaller grocery stores. One brand of orange juice. One brand of canned corn.

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- macallik@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I think the issue is that you are hypothesizing what you think you'd like, while ignoring all the real life examples that show things can go astray. For example, you talk about the benefits of not having a million little kings w/o acknowledging that the one kingmaker can make the head of groceries his inept brother-in-law who pockets half of the funds.
  
  Instead of responding to people why you like totalitarianism, how about you show reference a historical example that was beneficial to a society?
  
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