Solving for Dictatorship
Prior Art
- Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century. Book. Review - This work is a serious collection of the technology of ‘Strong Men’ maintaining power through manipulative techniques of the social process seen as elections where they exist; reducible to a checklist of gimmicks that reoccur with minor adjustments, in land after land, with an authoritarian in control. It is mildly entertaining but at heart is a composite of academic research on bypassing brutality as the prevailing gimmick.
What is more interesting in contemporary times is why ‘democracy’ is so widely under assault; and a seemingly quest for a ‘Strong Man’ to set matters in order again – the electoral lead-in to rising authoritarianism – occurring across the globe. These authors have little to offer here. A fuller humanitarian -- as it were -- offering on the same topic can be found in Popular Dictatorships: Crises, Mass Opinion, and the Rise of Electoral Authoritarianism by Aleksandar Matovs, who phrases the question of why a dictatorship is actually a product of their genuine popular appeal in countries experiencing deep political, economic and security crises: a more interesting question focusing on: The People. What were they hoping for?
- Popular Dictatorships: Crises, Mass Opinion, and the Rise of Electoral Authoritarianism by Aleksandar Matovs
Thoughts on Potential Solutions
Dictatorships are one of several kinds. Many are founded on abundance of commercially viable natural resources such as oil. These include Russia, Nigeria, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. Others do not have abundant resources outside of widespread resentment.
One powerful solution is to embargo, ie, not contract with assholes. In this case, the enabler is post-scarcity resources. For oil, the solution can solar hydrogen.
Thus, a generic formula emerges:
- DMS is engaged for democratizing a resource so that the capital base of the dictatorship is extniguished. This will tend to bring in added accountability in a more equitable system, under the assumption of functional institutions. Because the solution for popular dictatorships (countries experiencing deep political, economic and security crises) can best be an economic solution, open source economics has strong potential for solutions.
- Democratic institutions. Since highly-functioning, democratic institutions are typically lacking in the scenarios of interest, democratization assitance can be offered in the form of sizeable transition agreements or enterprise packages of open source productivity that produce mutually assured abundance. This is where we can design new institutions as startups, as part of ethical enterprise.
- Transformative Education. For democratic governance, the youth must be brought up to responsibility - to take over old politics of resentment. This can happen only through education for responsibility - based on functional, high-output generating mental models of reality. Just like we are developing with the OSE Fellowship. Thus, integrated design, integrated education, and integrated production tend to offer hope.
In Your Own Backyard
For global solutions to occur, we must start at home. This questions US policy of development, and corrects all its ills:
- Exporting manufacturing overseas for a non-resilient contribution to global power imbalance and unnecessary dependency, while exporting livelihood from your home town
- Erosion - 2 ton average erosion rate from tilled soil is not sustainable, and can be averted readily. Such as by 20% alley cropping which does not reduce output while adding diversity and minimizing erosion.
- Increasing labor productivity - automoation and robots has failed to date to increase Labor Productivity
- Lifetime design can increaase wealth retention by 100x in 10 years
- Affordable healthcare
- Petty politics of scarcity (one party republicrat system) to be averted - by open sector enterprise normalizing the playing field and thereby changing economics
- Courts of law converted to courts of justice
- Correcting the corrections in terms of mid-course correction of the Prison Industrial Complex
- Making housing affordable
- The Best and the Brightest - brilliant policies that defied common sense, or plain failure of international policy by risk-averse pencilnecks.
Out of solving the above and then some comes a moral privilege of true global stewardship.
