Comment by bruce511 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bruce511 | Hacker News Reader

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A benevolent dictator is the best form of government. Unfortunately though power corrupts and they have a habit of becoming self serving, and very much not benevolent.

I'm not just talking at the nation-state level, but at community, company, sports and so on. There's no shortage of Open Source projects run using the Benevolent Dictator approach.

Compare that to companies run by committee (or governments run by dead-locked congresses) which preport to "represent the people" but just turn into "nothing gets done" factories.

So yes, there are good dictatorships. They're especially good at getting stuff done.

There are also obviously bad dictatorships.

The analogy between projects/companies and governments is missing big components though.

- "Benevolent Dictators" of companies or projects have to obey the law - They can't forbid competition or alternatives - Every participant can leave at any time - If they burn the organization to the ground, the worst case scenario is the organization get replaced and people move on

I think it shows that we're using the word "dictator" way too casually in that case.

> So yes, there are good dictatorships. They're especially good at getting stuff done. There are also obviously bad dictatorships.

All dictatorships, by definition, are better at getting things done than organizations that require non-unilateral assent.

Instead, the difference between a good dictatorship and a bad dictatorship is that in a good dictatorship, dissidents are eliminated quietly or, if not quietly, then with enough spin that everyone considers their elimination to be a good thing.

In other words, what good dictatorships are good at is PR.

Also you can look at the history of the Nazis and it becomes apparent that they weren't good at much of anything except that: so successfully that "efficient Nazis" became a trope for decades after the war despite all the evidence lying around to the contrary.

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