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Comment by warumdarum | Hacker News Reader

Corruption depends on the rule of law. And you can not have rule of law, when the primary state-forming institution is the clan-family. Its just not possible. So any culture, that can not produce state-builders, is doomed to fail forever, with the history dotted with failures. Its hard to understand- but these states you see on the map, named and infamed- are not real. The clan who rules and the cityparts and cities they own and live in, that is the state. The rest- is conquered territories, ruled by other clan-families, who are subjugated and extracted from.

Which is why these countries are so much more prosperous when outsiders rule them, supressing the clan systems for anything more meritocratic.

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> Which is why these countries are so much more prosperous when outsiders rule them, supressing the clan systems for anything more meritocratic.

That's generally not how colonization worked. Quite often, colonization intentionally created the large scale tribal identities. Allegiance to clans grows because of deep suspicion of extractive governments put in place by outsiders.

The colonial system was meritocratic. It has a lot of bad things, but an absolutely staggering amount of Englishmen and Scotsmen and Welshman got their start and career through their hard work in India. A lot of whom, especially those minorities, would never have had a chance in G.B.

Lol I don't know if this is a dog whistle so much as a dog call.

There is nothing inherently unique to African culture that means Africans need western saviors to understand why their primitive clannish ways are holding them back. The same social unit is native to all human culture.

The problem is that the rest of the world wants African natural resources and a weak, distributed African power structure is good for that.

Hard to be a true state builder over the past 80 years without being capped by the CIA or else suborned to the soviets/bratva.

Which almost makes China's mercantilist foothold on the continent seem like an improvement.

Reminds me of the old joke about why communism never works

Why does communism never work?

Because eventually you get overthrown by the CIA

It’s hard to see from a US perspective, but for us in Africa it _is_ an improvement. China is actively growing client economies in a continent that has seen little but exploitation for the longest time. Despite all the fear mongering, they are yet to take adverse possession of a state utility or force the sale of a national asset when loans have defaulted. You know who does do things like that? The world bank and the IMF.

I’m not a big fan of China or their politics, but they have certainly been much more beneficial for Africa than the West has in recent memory.

When those countries were ruled by outsiders, the people who ran them weren't picking capable locals to have power, they were picking capable outsiders to have power. (And that's in the best case.)

The locals were only used for manual labour and filling out conscript armies (overseen by coloniser officers). This creates societies where, for generations, none of the natives have any experience with doing any of the jobs necessary to actually govern a country.

You do know that Ethiopia wasn't technically colonized ever, right? It had a single 5 year period of military occupation by Mussolini and co around 1936...

No, it's problems are largely self-inflicted. But what I said is quite relevant to countries that have been.

> And you can not have rule of law, when the primary state-forming institution is the clan-family

You can. See US (Boeing, Rockefeller etc), UK (Royal "family", house of lords, etc), Germany ( Porsche and others)

Well, a broader interpretation of this idea is that paradoxically there needs to be a certain level of authoritarianism in order to have a civil functioning republic.

In the 1900s this was communism. A lot of people (either disingenuously or not) interpreted this as anti-democratic. But if you look at what actually happened where conditions were right, it turned out to work well- China and Vietnam, and if you just look at authoritarianism, not just communist authoritarianism, then Singapore, S. Korea, Taiwan as well. Some would also argue that the USA falls into this category- that the same arm of the government suppressing corruption is also going after marginalized groups.

There aren't that many examples in history where the ideal balance is actually struck.

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