Free markets, liberal democracies, and so forth are just ways of distributing decision-making and control — that may be not optimal (e.g., they could be sometimes painfully slow compared to autocracies), but are good enough.

It all can be seen as a resilient distributed computer made of humans.

The USSR/communism failed not because it is inherently evil and soul-crushing, but mainly because it lacked the all-permeating, high-bandwidth information system that could survey and control all aspects of society in a centralized way (i.e., cyber-totalitarianism). But with all the new 21st-century technology and AI, it possibly could have succeeded...

We're living in interesting times.