Sergei M. Guriev and Daniel Treisman write,
Rather than terrorizing or indoctrinating the population, rulers survive by leading citizens to believe—rationally but incorrectly—that they are competent and benevolent. Having won popularity, dictators score points both at home and abroad by mimicking democracy. Violent repression, rather than being helpful, is counterproductive: it undercuts the image of able governance that leaders seek to cultivate.
They are offering a theory of dictatorship in which the dictator obtains power through nonviolent persuasion. In political science, I believe that this is known as “legitimacy.” In this case, their thesis is that dictators achieve their legitimacy through the control of information.
But the relationship between legitimacy and control over information also might be important in a democracy. That is what Curtis Yarvin argues in a recent essay.
all modern regimes are Orwellian thought-control regimes.
. . .we can explain how a decentralized civil society, effectively protected from democracy, can, does, and indeed must become a distributed Orwellian despotism. But we’ll postpone these loose ends till the final essay.
Any ruling elite must “survive by leading citizens to believe—rationally but incorrectly—that they are competent and benevolent.” The phenomenon that Martin Gurri calls The Revolt of the Public is the loss of this belief in the era of the Internet and social media.
Note: Tyler Cowen recently pointed to a paper by Guriev and others that also is pertinent to Martin Gurri’s thesis.
Much like Guirri the Revolt Of The Public still comes across as bad internet comments not significant action, the modern governments have minor Orwellian thought-controlled regimes. These are not Maoist or Stalinist. In the case of Obama he was moved the goalpost a few yards at time while Trumpian tendencies tend to a lot trolling exercises. And even the most effective Orwellian government China seems to cracked the code that you need Large Corporations to be your most loyal supporters. (Analogous to the old Kings have the Lords loyal support centuries ago.) So it appears US and most Western nations are following the 2008 Obama global liberalism (govern as Clinton) versus 2016 Trumpian Nationalism.
And I would suggest most of the US increases in security spending domestically is by private actors not by the government. Even though our neighborhood is not gated, about half the houses have security cameras on them.
When forced to choose (at least in the short term) between competent and benevolent… do you want someone good at oppressing you or bad at caring for you?
For most of America, the Obama/Clinton complex is, in the wake of the H. Clinton campaign, obviously the first – and given an inability to corral the legislature, the Trump complex appears to be the second.
Meanwhile, many national populations appear to believe that people who care about them can learn how to manage, while people who don’t care have nothing to learn. That gives a sense of the long term prospects for the two choices.
We have a 24/7 tweeter in the White House.
Even the elites have little clue about what comes next. Trump tweets foul the search engines, disturb the separation of tribal semantics, a troll effect as collin mentioned above. A Trump tweet often crosses semantic boundary and on a search of tweet words the search engine produces unfavorable tribal sites, propagating the troll effect.
Arnold’s Comment:
“Any ruling elite must “survive by leading citizens to believe—rationally but incorrectly—that they are competent and benevolent.” The phenomenon that Martin Gurri calls The Revolt of the Public is the loss of this belief in the era of the Internet and social media.”
Leaving aside, for the moment, whether there is any remaining “ruling elite” (or any “elite” for that matter); we can observe that *authority* (and thus the powers derivative) is largely dependent on the factors cited in the quotation. However, authority requires authenticity (authentication now being tested).
In an essay (1), 70 years ago, Hayek provided an identification of the “. . . organs which modern society has developed for spreading knowledge and ideas . . . ” Hayek describes them as “intellectuals,” which Robert Nozick, in a 1984 essay (2), found enlarged to “wordsmith intellectuals.” Hayek further notes that in that function of those “intellectuals,” “. . . it is their convictions and opinions which operate as the sieve through which all new conceptions must pass before they can reach the masses.”
There we have the word – the “Masses.” Lippmann seemed to have given up on them, en bloc, in his 1922 “Public Opinion.” Oakeshott observes the shaping of “Mass Man’s” views in his 1961 (3) “The masses in representative democracy.” Part IV of Schumpeter’s best known work goes deeper.
As the basins of information now overflow and the “filtration” through “intellectuals” can be seen by more and more of the “public” and leach into the conscious of the “Masses,” for what it is, then the real “Revolt” is a change, even a discard, of the previously established organs developed for the spread of information and knowledge; and, if other facilities are developed for the spread of information and to provide improved, or less constrained, ways to convert information into knowledge for the broad base of the populace, we may well see a different social structure evolve.
Here are he footnotes:
(1) The Intellectuals and Socialism -University of Chicago Law Review, Vol. 16, No. 3
Spring 1949.
(2) Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism? in “Socratic Puzzles,” (Harvard University Press, 1997)
(3) Reprinted in “Rationalism in Politics” ( Liberty Fund 1991)
==Any ruling elite must “survive by leading citizens to believe—rationally but incorrectly—that they are competent and benevolent.”==
What is failing is the “intellectuals” ability to sell this belief. As such we see the dire conflicts among academics and pundits. This has caused the sinecures offered by the State to intellectuals to become insecure.
“For this essential acceptance, the majority must be persuaded by ideology that their government is good, wise and, at least, inevitable, and certainly better than other conceivable alternatives. Promoting this ideology among the people is the vital social task of the “intellectuals.” For the masses of men do not create their own ideas, or indeed think through these ideas independently; they follow passively the ideas adopted and disseminated by the body of intellectuals. The intellectuals are, therefore, the “opinion-molders” in society. And since it is precisely a molding of opinion that the State most desperately needs, the basis for age-old alliance between the State and the intellectuals becomes clear.
“It is evident that the State needs the intellectuals; it is not so evident why intellectuals need the State. Put simply, we may state that the intellectual’s livelihood in the free market is never too secure; for the intellectual must depend on the values and choices of the masses of his fellow men, and it is precisely characteristic of the masses that they are generally uninterested in intellectual matters. The State, on the other hand, is willing to offer the intellectuals a secure and permanent berth in the State apparatus; and thus a secure income and the panoply of prestige. For the intellectuals will be handsomely rewarded for the important function they perform for the State rulers, of which group they now become a part.”
Rothbard, Murray N.. The Anatomy of the State (LvMI) . Ludwig von Mises Institute. Kindle Edition.