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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

One could argue that “totalitarianism” was the default government form for most of history.

The problem is, the higher we go on the Maslow pyramid, the more likely it is for it to fail. You just can’t have a huge mass of creative, inventive people without them complaining about leadership (and wanting to improve it).

And totalitarianism by definition has problems accepting criticism.

The only way for totalitarianism to “work” is if the rulers are both much smarter than the population as a whole and also benevolent.

Regarding China, let’s see. These kinds of regimes don’t fail immediately. Just the cracks get bigger and bigger. From what I heard there’s a consolidation of power going on, that’s generally a sure sign of the first cracks appearing.

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>The only way for totalitarianism to “work” is if the rulers are both much smarter than the population as a whole and also benevolent.

I dont think thats realistic anymore. Once they are able to hit first and hit hard when opposition forms, they are pretty much untouchable.

The whole argument, of autocratic regimes having a higher chance of collapsing the longer the reign looks like a naive outdated approach to me. It bets on a critical mass of opposition forming. With total surveillance this wont happen.

A successful mass protest has to start somewhere. If you arrest those first people willing to risk everything you quell the entire thing. Its the basic concept of 1984. The only thing holding back this dystopia was the lack of a big brother state with sufficient insight.

We had many totalitarian, mass surveillance states collapse practically overnight less than 30 years ago.

There mass surveillance back then was child's play in comparison what is possible today. There is a tipping point which is hopefully still in the future, where dissent is detectable and predictable enough that regimes are no longer at risk to collapse.

If you look at collapses of authoritarian regimes due to public pressure, they happen to a similar pattern. A small group of people start a protest and depending on how hated the regime is and how bad the living condition for most people are, others will join in, the more the less likely it becomes for them to be individually picked out.

This only works if the initial small group has enough time to motivate enough people to join in so that it snowballs. Earlier approaches were to minimize the time the small groups had to snowball with quick and hard actions, but with more and more surveillance, it becomes possible to target people even before they join. At a certain point it becomes possible to watch over every last citizen and target anyone who might be willing to start something like this in the future.

The amount of protests in China has been exploding over the past decade(s). I didn't even know until someone mentioned it on here a few months back, but iirc its gone from maybe a few thousand per year in the 90s to well over 100,000 in recent years.

The Chinese rich I've interacted with are also (in my experience, at least - I don't have stats to support this) really ignorant of how bad a lot of their countrymen have it. A friend of mine's father is some sort of government official in a tier 1 or 2 city, and he's told me that the rich and poor are segregated enough that he himself didn't even realize his family was anything other than middle class until he came to Canada and saw it wasn't exactly normal to have parents who can afford 100k+ annual tuition, luxury cars and apartments, etc.

> You just can’t have a huge mass of creative, inventive people without them complaining about leadership (and wanting to improve it).

You create an upper middle class for the "creatives" and you restrict the areas of creativity to military and industrial use.

Most well off people that I know are happy to think the poor deserve to be poor and repressed (different people have different reasons for justifying it. Few seen to really care).

Nothing is forever. The current regime in China won't be forever either. The question is how long.

After Augustus Rome still had a couple of hundred years of expansion where a nationalist could argue, “hey look at that! Things are still going good.” But they couldn’t outrun the rot in the system forever.

After Xi will China get another strongman? I think this is the key. If there are a series of total dictators things will decay. Whatever justifications a dictator uses for their rules, ultimately they are going to try to implement policies that keep themselves on top first.

This is a great point. Xi is a strongman dictator and has arguably harmed Communist rule a lot more than he realizes by eliminating term limits. If the next ruler is some fool who cannot handle the crises that a country inevitably faces... it could lead to the country's undoing.

Which is why I am personally a lot more alarmed at the current US Presidency than most of my peers. Inept rulers have historically been the best predictors of a civilization's downfall. The fervent opposition to the administration by ordinary US citizens gives me hope but if Republicans continue to hold on to power after November, I really do feel that all will be lost.

> "only way for totalitarianism to “work” is if the rulers are both much smarter than the population as a whole"

The party can pick the smart people from population to join.

That didn’t work for the USSR, why would it work for China? As long as some things are off limits / as long as people know they arn’t alowed to research this or that, then they’ll be at a long term disadvantage to those that do.

China was here before. Cutting yourself off from the world just means you eventually find yourself having fallen behind everyone else.

> That didn’t work for the USSR, why would it work for China?

The CCP does have the benefit of learning from the failures of the Soviets.

> China was here before. Cutting yourself off from the world just means you eventually find yourself having fallen behind everyone else.

That mainly happened because they were so dominant in their sphere that they didn't bother themselves with far off areas that seemed primitive to them. I'm pretty sure the CCP has learned from that mistake.

If they had learned from that mistake they wouldn’t be trying to wall the internet off.

> If they had learned from that mistake they wouldn’t be trying to wall the internet off.

They're walling off foreign political ideas and avenues for domestic political organization, not foreign technological advancements. They are very explicit about that.

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/world/asia/chinas-new-lea...

But once the smart people are in, which person eventually winds up on top is determined by party politics.

Do we actually need creative inventive people? Maybe at some point we run low on truly innovative new ideas that are truly practical. Maybe we just start re-skinning the old ideas and selling them for no real benefit, and could do without the whole process. Maybe that's already in the process of happening.

Basic research needs those people. And in the end they win. That’s how we got the alphabet, iron working, etc.

> You just can’t have a huge mass of creative, inventive people without them complaining about leadership (and wanting to improve it).

You could split a country economically into a wealthy economic zone and a zone for the working class.

Or you could have a wealthy country that helps another country to be totalitarian, for the right economic gains.

It's one thing to invoke Abraham Maslow for aesthetic purposes during flowery discussion, but Maslow isn't followed much or at all by current researchers.

I can’t say I follow modern economics too closely, but does anyone really dispute that the need for food is a lower level one than the need for academic achievements, for example?

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