I flat-out disagree that power corrupts as the phrase is usually understood, but that’s a topic worthy of rational discussion (just not now with me).
The claim that there has never been a truly benevolent dictator though, that’s simply a religious assertion, a key point of faith in the American democratic religion and no more worthy of discussion than whether the Earth is old, at least for usual meanings of the word ‘benevolent’ and for meanings of ‘dictator’ which avoid the no true Scotsman fallacy. There have been benevolent democratically elected leaders in the usual sense too. How confident do you think you should be that the latter are more common than the former though? Why?
I’m seriously inclined to down-vote the whole comment community on this one except for Peter, though I won’t, for their failure to challenge such an overt assertion of such an absurd claim. How many people would have jumped in against the claim that without belief in god there can be no morality or public order, that the moral behavior of secular people is just a habit or hold-over from Christian times, and that thus that all secular societies are doomed? To me it’s about equally credible.
BTW, just from the 20th century there are people from Ataturk to FDR to Lee Kuan Yew to Deng Chou Ping. More generally, more or less The Entire History of the World especially East Asia are counter-examples.
that’s a topic worthy of rational discussion (just not now with me).
If this is a plea to be let alone on the topic, then, feel free to ignore my comment below—I’m posting in case third parties want to respond.
The claim that there has never been a truly benevolent dictator though, that’s simply a religious assertion,
Perhaps it’s phrased poorly. There have certainly been plenty of dictators who often meant well and who often, on balance, did more good than harm for their country—but such dictators are rare exceptions, and even these well-meaning, useful dictators may not have been “truly” benevolent in the sense that they presided over hideous atrocities. Obviously a certain amount of illiberal behavior is implicit in what it means to be a dictator—to argue that FDR was non-benevolent because he served four terms or managed the economy with a heavy hand would indeed involve a “no true Scotsman” fallacy. But a well-intentioned, useful, illiberal ruler may nevertheless be surprisingly bloody, and this is a warning that should be widely and frequently promulgated, because it is true and important and people tend to forget it.
BTW, just from the 20th century there are people from Ataturk to FDR to Lee Kuan Yew to Deng Chou Ping. More generally, more or less The Entire History of the World especially East Asia are counter-examples.
*Ataturk is often accused of playing a leading role in the Armenian genocide, and at the very least seems to have been involved in dismissing courts that were trying war criminals without providing replacement courts, and in conquering territories where Armenians were massacred shortly after the conquest.
*Deng Chou Ping was probably the most powerful person in China at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacres, and it is not clear that he exerted any influence to attempt to disperse the protesters peacefully or even with a minimum of violence: tanks were used in urban areas and secret police hunted down thousands of dissidents even after the protests had ended. One might have hoped that a benevolent illiberal ruler, when confronted with peaceful demands for democracy, would simply say “No.” and ignore the protesters except in so far as they were creating a public nuisance.
*FDR presided over the internment of hundreds of thousands of American citizens in concentration camps solely on the basis of race, as well as the firebombing of Dresden, Hamburg, and Tokyo. The first conflagration of a residential area could have been an accident, but there is no evidence of which I am aware that the Allies ever took steps to prevent tens of thousands of civilians from being burnt alive, such as, e.g., taking care to only bomb non-urban industrial targets on hot, dry, summer days. Although Hitler is surely far more responsible than FDR for the Holocaust, a truly benevolent ruler would probably have spared an air raid or two to cut the railroad tracks that led from Jewish ghettos to German death camps. Whatever you might think about FDR’s leadership (I would not presume to judge him or to say that I could have done better in his place), it was surprisingly bloody for a benevolent person.
Lee Kuan Yew seems to have been a fairly good dictator, but in his autobiography, he claims to have directly benefited from the US’s war efforts in Vietnam, and he says that he would not have remained in power but for the US efforts. For its part, the US State Department explicitly claimed that the Vietnam war was intended to prevent countries like Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore from falling like dominoes after a possible Communization of Vietnam. Although it would probably be unfair to lay moral culpability for, e.g., Mai Lai or Agent Orange on Lee Kuan Yew (and thus I do not say he is in any way to blame), it is still worth noting that Yew’s dictatorship was indirectly maintained by years of surprisingly bloody violence. Thus, Yew may be an exception that proves the rule—even when you yourself, as an aspiring dictator, do not get your hands bloody as power corrupts you, it is possible that you are saved from bloody hands only by a friend who gets his hands bloody for you.
I simply deny the assertion that dictators who wanted good results and got them were rare exceptions. Citation needed.
Admittedly, dictators have frequently presided over atrocities, unlike democratic rulers who have never presided over atrocities such as slavery, genocide, or more recently, say the Iraq war, Vietnam, or in an ongoing sense, the drug war or factory farming.
Human life is bloody. Power pushes the perceived responsibility for that brute fact onto the powerful. People are often scum, but avoiding power doesn’t actually remove their responsibility. Practically every American can save lives for amounts of money which are fairly minor to them. What are the relevant differences between them and French aristocrats who could have done the same? I see one difference. The French aristocrats lived in a Malthusian world where tehy couldn’t really have impacted total global suffering with the local efforts available?
How is G.W. Bush more corrupt than the people who elected him. He seems to care more for the third world poor than they do, and not obviously less for rule of law or the welfare of the US.
Playing fast and loose with geopolitical realities, (Iraq is only slightly about oil, for instance) I’d like to conclude with the observation that even when you yourself, as a middle class American, don’t get your hands bloody as cheap oil etc corrupt you, it is possible that you are saved from bloody hands by an elected representative who you hired to do the job.
I simply deny the assertion that dictators who wanted good results and got them were rare exceptions. Citation needed.
The standards of evaluation of goodness should be specified in greater detail first. Else it is quite difficult to tell whether e.g. Atatürk was really benevolent or not, even if we agree on goodness of his individual actions. Some of the questions
are the points scored by getting desired good results cancelled by the atrocities, and to what extent?
could a non-dictatorial regime do better (given the conditions in the specific country and historical period), and if no, can the dictator bear full responsibility for his deeds?
what amount of goodness makes a dictator benevolent?
Unless we first specify the criteria, the risk of widespread rationalisation in this discussion is high.
That was perhaps the cheapest upvote I ever got. Thanks. (Unfortunately Ceauşescu was anything but benevolent, else he would be mentioned and I could gather additional upvotes for the comma.)
It’s hard to find proof of what most people consider obvious, unless its part of the Canon of Great Moments in Science (tm) and the textbook industry can make a bundle off it. Tell you what—if you like, I’ll trade you a promise to look for the citation you want for a promise to look for primary science on anthropogenic global warming. I suspect we’re making the climate warmer, but I don’t know where to read a peer-reviewed article documenting the evidence that we are. I’ll spend any reasonable amount of time that you do looking -- 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 90 minutes—and if I can’t find anything, I’ll admit to being wrong.
unlike democratic rulers who have never presided over atrocities such as slavery, genocide, or more recently, say the Iraq war, Vietnam, or in an ongoing sense, the drug war or factory farming.
Slavery, genocide, and factory farming are examples of imperfect democracy—the definition of “citizen” simply isn’t extended widely enough yet. Fortunately, people (slowly) tend to notice the inconsistency in times of relative peace and prosperity, and extend additional rights. Hence the order-of-magnitude decrease in the fraction of the global population that is enslaved, and, if you believe Stephen Pinker, in the frequency of ethnic killings. As for factory farming, I sincerely hope the day when animals are treated as citizens when appropriate will come, and the quicker it comes the better I’ll be pleased. On the other hand, if you glorify dictatorship, or if you give dictatorship an opening to glorify itself, it tends to pretty effectively suppress talk about widening the circle of compassion. Better to have a hypocritical system of liberties than to let vice walk the streets without paying any tribute to virtue at all; such tributes can collect compound interest over the centuries.
The Vietnam war is generally recognized as a failure of democracy; the two most popular opponents of the war were assassinated, and the papers providing the policy rationale for the war were illegally hidden, ultimately causing the downfall of President Nixon. The drug war seems to be winding down as the high cost of prisons sinks in. The war on Iraq is probably democracy’s fault.
Human life is bloody. Power pushes the perceived responsibility for that brute fact onto the powerful.
True enough, but it also pushes some of the real responsibility onto the powerful. I would much rather kill one person than stand by and let ten die, but I would much rather let one person die than kill one person—responsibility counts for something.
it is possible that you are saved from bloody hands by an elected representative who you hired to do the job.
God forbid, if you’ll excuse the expression. I’m not paying anybody to butcher for me, although sometimes, despite my best efforts, they take my tax dollars for the purpose. So far as I can manage it without being thrown in jail, it’s not in my name; I vote against any incumbent that commits atrocities, and campaign for people who promise not to, and buy renewable energy from the power company and fair-trade imports from the third world and humanely-labeled meat from the supermarket. I’m sure that I still benefit from all kinds of bloody shenanigans, but it’s not because I want to.
Finally, are you any relation to Michael Vassar, the political philosopher and scholar of just war theory? You seem to have a mind that is open like his, and a similarly agile debating style, but you also seem considerably bitterer than his published works.
I don’t think I glorify dictatorship, but I do think that terribly dictatorships, like Stalinist Russia, have sometimes spoken of widening circles of compassion.
I do think you are glorifying democracy. Do you have examples of perfect democracy to contrast with imperfect democracy? Slaves frequently aren’t citizens, but on other occasions, such as in the immense and enslaving US prison system (with its huge rates of false conviction and of conviction for absurd crimes), or the military draft they are. The reduction in slavery may be due to philosophical progress trickling down to the masses, or it may simply be that slavery has become less economically competitive as markets have matured.
Responsibility counts for something, but for far less among the powerful. As power increases, custom weakens, and situations become more unique, acts/omissions distinctions become less useful. As a result, rapid rises in power do frequently leave people without a moral compass, leading to terrible actions.
I appreciate your efforts to avoid indirectly causing harms.
I didn’t know about the other Michael Vassar. It’s an uncommon name, so I’m surprised to hear it.
By which you mean, I suppose, that my skill as a rhetorician has exceeded my skill as a rationalist. Well, you may be right. Supposing you are, what do you suggest I do about it?
I do think you are glorifying democracy.
Well, yes, I am. Not our democracy, not any narrow technique for promoting democracy, but democracy as the broad principle that people should have a decisive say in the decisions that affect them strikes me as pretty awesome. I guess I might be claiming benefits for democracy in excess of what I have evidence to support, and that if I were an excellent rationalist, I would simply say, “I do not know what the effects of attempting democracy are.”
I am not an excellent rationalist. What I do is to look hard for the answers to important questions, and then, if after long searching I cannot find the answers and I have no hope of finding the answers, but the questions still seem important, I choose an answer that appeals to my intuition.
I spent the better part of my undergraduate years trying to understand what democracy is, what violence is, and whether the two have any systematic relation to each other. Scientifically speaking, my answer is that we do not know, and will not know, in all likelihood, for quite some time. Violence happens in places where researchers find it difficult or impossible to record it; death tolls are so biased by partisans of various stripes, by the credulity of an entertainment-based media, and by the fog of war that one can almost never tell which of two similarly-sized conflicts was more violent. Democracy is, at best, a correlation among several variables, each of which can only be specified with 2 or 3 bits of meaningful information, and each of which might have different effects on violence. Given the confusion, to scientifically state a relationship between democracy and violence would be ridiculous.
And, yet, I find that I very much want to know what the relationship is between democracy and violence. I can oppose all offensive wars designed to change another country’s regime type on the grounds that science supports no prediction that the certain deaths from war will be outweighed by bloodiness removed in an allegedly safer regime. What about defensive wars? I find that I cannot bring myself to say, “I would not fight to preserve my region’s measure of democracy against an outside autocratic invader, because I do not know, scientifically, that such a fight would reduce total bloodiness.” I would fight, believing without scientific evidence that such a war would be better than surrender.
Am I simply deluding myself? Most people on Less Wrong will think so. I do not particularly care. I am far more concerned about the danger of reasoning myself into a narcissistic, quiet-ist corner where I never take political action than I am about the danger of backing an ideal that turns out to be empty.
Using the Hansonian “far-view reference class,” the odds that an ideal chosen based on “things I believe in because I was taught to believe in them” is worth killing for are near zero. Using the same method, the odds that an ideal chosen based on “things that I believe in after carefully examining all available evidence and finding that I cannot think of a good reason to overturn my culture’s traditions, despite having actively questioned them” is worth killing for are high enough that I can sleep at night. If you believe I should be awake, I look forward to your reply.
Not at all. Rhetorical skill IS a good thing, and properly contributes to logic. Your argument seems rational to me, in the non-Spock sense that we generally encourage here. What to do? Keep on thinking AND caring!
If the search you use is as fair and unbiased as you can make it, this looking hard for answers is the core of what being a good rationalist is. Possibly, you should look harder for the causes of systematic differences between people’s intuitions, to see whether those causes are entangled with truth, but analysis has to stop at some point.
In practice, rationalists may back themselves into permanent inaction due to uncertainty, but the theory of rationality we endorse here says we should be doing what you claim to be doing. I find it extremely disturbing that we aren’t communicating this effectively, though its clearly our fault since we aren’t communicating it effectively enough to ourselves for it to motivate us to be more dynamic either.
When you say you glorify Democracy though, I think you mean something much closer to what I would call Coherent Extrapolated Volition than it is to what I would call Democracy. Something radically novel that hasn’t ever been tried, or even specified in enough detail to call it a proposal without some charity.
As a factual matter, I would suggest that the systems of government that we call Democracies in the US may typically be a bit further in the CEV direction than those we typically call dictatorships, but if they are, its a weak tendency, like the tendency of good painters to be good at basketball or something. You might detect it statistically, if you had properly operationalized it first, or vaguely suspect its there based on intuitive perception, but you couldn’t ever be very confident it was there.
It’s obviously wrong to overturn cultural traditions which have been questioned but not refuted. Such traditions have some information value, if only for anthropic reasons, and more importantly, they are somewhat correlated with your values. In this particular case, if you limit your options under consideration to ‘fight against invaders or do nothing’ I have no objections. Real life situations usually present more options, but those weren’t specified.
As an off-the-cuff example, I think its obvious that a person who fought against the NAZIs in WWII was doing something better than they would by staying home even though the NAZIs didn’t invade the US and even valuing their lives moderately more highly than those of others. OTOH, the marginal expected impact of a soldier on the expected outcome of the war was surely SO MUCH less than the marginal expected impact of an independent person who put in serious effort to be an assassin, while the risk was probably not an order of magnitude smaller, so I think its fair to say that they were still being irrational, judged as altruists, and were in most cases, well, only following orders. If they valued victory enough to be a soldier they should have done something more effective instead. (have I just refuted Yossarian or confirmed him?)
I think that they should definitely sleep at night. Should feel happy and proud even… but in their shoes I wouldn’t.
Finally, are you any relation to Michael Vassar, the political philosopher and scholar of just war theory? You seem to have a mind that is open like his, and a similarly agile debating style, but you also seem considerably bitterer than his published works.
Tell you what—if you like, I’ll trade you a promise to look for the citation you want for a promise to look for primary science on anthropogenic global warming. I suspect we’re making the climate warmer, but I don’t know where to read a peer-reviewed article documenting the evidence that we are.
I don’t know if you’re still looking for this, and if this would be an appropriate place to post links. But:
Primary Evidence:
temperatures increase over the last 2000 years as estimated by tree ring, marine/lake/cave proxy, ice isotopes, glacier length/mass, and borehole data.
figures S-1, O-4, 2-3, 2-5, 5-3, 6-3, 7-1, 10-4, and 11-2 are probably the most useful to you. Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years. Committee on Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years, National Research Council
ISBN: 0-309-66144-7, 160 pages, 7 x 10, (2006)
earlier flowering times in recent 25 years, with data taken over the past 250 years. Amano, et. al [A 250-year index of first flowering dates and its response to temperature changes] (http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/277/1693/2451.full). Proc. R. Soc. B 22 August 2010 vol. 277 no. 1693 2451-2457
Contradicting evidence:
extremes of monthly average temperatures in Central England do not appear to match either a “high extremes after 1780s/1850s only” or “low extremes before 1780s/1850s only” hypothesis. Manley. [Central England temperatures: Monthly means 1659 to 1973] (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/qj.49710042511/abstract). Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society. Volume 100, Issue 425, pages 389–405, July 1974
One might have hoped that a benevolent illiberal ruler, when confronted with peaceful demands for democracy, would simply say “No.” and ignore the protesters except in so far as they were creating a public nuisance.
In America, we have grown jaded towards protests because they don’t ever accomplish anything. But at their most powerful, protests become revolutions. If Deng would have just ignored the protesters indefinitely, the CCP would have fallen. Perhaps the protest could have been dispersed without loss of life, but it’s only very recently that police tactics have advanced to the point of being able to disburse large groups of defensively-militarized protesters without killing people. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_model and compare to the failure of the police at the Seattle WTO protests of 1999.
I’m seriously inclined to down-vote the whole comment community on this one except for Peter, though I won’t, for their failure to challenge such an overt assertion of such an absurd claim.
I was tempted to challenge it, but I decided that it’s not worth to open such an emotionally charged can of worms.
The claim that there has never been a truly benevolent dictator though, that’s simply a religious assertion, a key point of faith in the American democratic religion and no more worthy of discussion than whether the Earth is old, at least for usual meanings of the word ‘benevolent’ and for meanings of ‘dictator’ which avoid the no true Scotsman fallacy. There have been benevolent democratically elected leaders in the usual sense too. How confident do you think you should be that the latter are more common than the former though? Why?
These are some good remarks and questions, but I’d say you’re committing a fallacy when you contrast dictators with democratically elected leaders as if it were some sort of dichotomy, or even a typically occurring contrast. There have been many non-democratic political arrangements in human history other than dictatorships. Moreover, it’s not at all clear that dictatorships and democracies should be viewed as disjoint phenomena. Unless we insist on a No-True-Scotsman definition of democracy, many dictatorships, including quite nasty ones, have been fundamentally democratic in the sense of basing their power on majority popular support.
There have been many non-democratic political arrangements in human history other than dictatorships.
Good point. For example, if you squint hard enough, the choosing of a council or legislature through lots as was done for a time in the Venetian state, is “democratic” in that everyone in some broad class (the people eligible to be chosen at random) had an equal chance to participate in the government, but would not meet with the approval of most modern advocates of democracy, even though IMHO it is worth trying again.
The Venetians understood that some of the people chosen by lot would be obviously incompent at governing, so their procedure alternated phases in which a group was chosen by lot with phases in which the group that is the output of the previous phase vote to determine the makeup of the input to the next phase with the idea that the voting phases would weed out those who were obviously incompetent. So, though there was voting, it was done only by the relatively tiny number of people who had been selected by lot—and (if we ignore information about specific individuals) they had the same chance of becoming a legislator as the people they were voting on.
IMHO probably the worst effect of Western civilization’s current overoptimism about democracy will be to inhibit experiments in forms of non-democratic government that would not have been possible before information technology (including the internet) became broadly disseminated. (Of course such experiments should be small in scale till they have built up a substantial track record.)
IMHO probably the worst effect of Western civilization’s current overoptimism about democracy will be to inhibit experiments in forms of non-democratic government that would not have been possible before information technology (including the internet) became broadly disseminated.
I beg to differ. The worst effect is that throughout recent history, democratic ideas have regularly been foisted upon peoples and places where the introduction of democratic politics was a perfect recipe for utter disaster. I won’t even try to quantify the total amount of carnage, destruction, and misery caused this way, but it’s certainly well above the scale of those political mass crimes and atrocities that serve as the usual benchmarks of awfulness nowadays. Of course, all this normally gets explained away with frantic no-true-Scotsman responses whenever unpleasant questions are raised along these lines.
For full disclosure, I should add that I care particularly strongly about this because I was personally affected by one historical disaster that was brought about this way, namely the events in former Yugoslavia. Regardless of what one thinks about who bears what part of the blame for what happened there, one thing that’s absolutely impossible to deny is that all the key players enjoyed democratic support confirmed by free elections.
Seconded. I live in Russia, and if you compare the well-being of citizens in Putin’s epoch against Yeltsin’s, Putin wins so thoroughly that it’s not even funny.
Also: The economy in Yeltsin’s day was unusually bad, in deep recession due to pre-collapse economic problems, combined with the difficulties of switching over. In addition, today’s economy benefits from a relatively high price for oil.
I assumed you meant that economic growth (in general) meant that the wellbeing of people is generally going to be greater when the year count is greater. I was providing specific reasons why the economy at the time would have been worse than regressing economic growth would suggest, other than political leadership.
Yes, that is a very bad effect of the overoptimism about democracy.
Another example: even the vast majority of those (the non-whites) who could not vote in Rhodesia were significantly better off than they came to be after the Jimmy Carter administration forced the country (now called Zimbabwe) to give them the vote.
I agree with everything in your paragraph. The important distinction between states as I see it is more between totalitarian and non-totalitarian than between democratic and non-democratic, as the latter tends to be a fairly smooth continuum. I was working within the local parlance for an American audience.
I agree that statements like all As are Bs are likely to be only approximately true and if you look you will find counter examples. But… ‘power corrupts’ is a fairly reliable rule of thumb as rules of thumb go. I include a couple of refs that took all of 3 minutes to find although I couldn’t find the really good one that I noticed a year or so ago.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1298606
abstract: We investigate the effect of power differences and associated expectations in social decision-making. Using a modified ultimatum game, we show that allocators lower their offers to recipients when the power difference shifts in favor of the allocator. Remarkably, however, when recipients are completely powerless, offers increase. This effect is mediated by a change in framing of the situation: when the opponent is without power, feelings of social responsibility are evoked. On the recipient side, we show that recipients do not anticipate these higher outcomes resulting from powerlessness. They prefer more power over less, expecting higher outcomes when they are more powerful, especially when less power entails powerlessness. Results are discussed in relation to empathy gaps and social responsibility.
http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2010/01/power.php
from J Lehrer’s comments: The scientists argue that power is corrupting because it leads to moral hypocrisy. Although we almost always know what the right thing to do is—cheating at dice is a sin—power makes it easier to justify the wrongdoing, as we rationalize away our moral mistake.
“Monarchs, more so than other autocrats, tend to develop norms that help elites solve their collective action problem. Such a “political culture” makes monarchs’ commitments credible. Therefore, monarchs should exhibit longer tenures and faster growth than non-monarchs. Time-series cross-sectional analyses corroborate these hypotheses for the Middle East and North Africa between 1950 and 2004. Monarchs are less likely to suffer coups, revolutions, or government crises. Additionally, as oil rents increase in monarchies, they generate higher economic growth—which does not happen in non-monarchies. A case study of Qatar’s political history puts flesh on a theory of monarchical political culture.”
I can think of a number of reasons why monarchs may suffer somewhat less from the ‘power corrupts’ norm. (1) often educated from childhood to use power wisely (2) often feel their power is legit and therefore less fearful of overthrow (3) tend to get better ‘press’ than other autocrats so that abuse of power less noticeable (4) often have continuity and structure in their advisors inherited from previous monarch.
Despite this, there have been some pretty nasty monarchs through history—even ones that are thought of as great like Good Queen Bess. However, if I had to live in an autocratic state I would prefer an established monarchy, all others things being equal.
Voted up for using data, though I’m very far from convinced by the specific data. The first seems irrelevant or at best very weakly suggestive. Regarding the second, I’m pretty confident that scientists profoundly mis-understand what sort of thing hypocrisy is as a consequence of the same profound misunderstanding of what sort of thing mind is which lead to the failures of GOFAI. I guess I also think they misunderstand what corruption is, though I’m less clear on that.
It’s really critical that we distinguish power corrupting from fear and weakness producing pro-social submission and from fearful people invoking morality to cover over cowardice. In the usual sense of the former concept corruption is something that should be expected, for instance, to be much more gradual. One should really notice that heroes in stories for adults are not generally rule-abiding, and frequently aren’t even typically selfless. Acting more antisocial, like the people you actually admire (except when you are busy resenting their affronts to you) do, because like them you are no longer afraid is totally different from acting like people you detest.
I don’t think that “power corrupts” is a helpful approximation at the level of critical thinking ability common here. (what models are useful depends on what other models you have).
Perhaps it would be more accurate to state “The structural dynamics of dictatorial regimes demands coercion be used, while decentralized power systems allow dissent”; even the Philosopher King must murder upstarts who would take the throne. Mass Driver’s comments (below) support this, with Lee Kuan Yew’s power requiring violent coercion being performed on his behalf, and the examples of Democratic Despotism largely boil down to a lack of accountability and transparency in the elected leaders—essentially they became (have become) too powerful.
“Power corrupts” is just the colloquial form.
(It is possible that I am in a Death Spiral with this idea, but this analysis occurred to me spontaneously—I didn’t go seeking out an explanation that fit my theory)
Voted up for precision. I see decentralization of power as less relevant than regime stability as an enabler of non-violence. Kings in long-standing monarchies, philosophical or not, need use little violence. New dictators (classically called tyrants) need use much violence. In addition, they have the advantage of having been selected for ability and the disadvantage of having been poorly educated for their position.
Of course, power ALWAYS scales up the impact of your actions. Lets say that I’m significantly more careful than average. In that case, my worst actions include doing things that have a .1% chance of killing someone every decade. Scale that up by ten million and its roughly equivalent to killing ten thousand people once during a decade long reign over a mid-sized country. I’d call that much better than Lincoln (who declared marshal law and was an elected dictator if Hitler was one) or FDR but MUCH worse than Deng. OTOH, Lincoln and FDR lived in an anarchy, the international community, and I don’t. I couldn’t be as careful/scrupulous as I am if I lived in an anarchy.
While I’d disagree with your description of FDR as a dictator, you’re quite right about Ataturk, and your other examples expose my woefully insufficient knowledge of non-Western history. My belief has been updated, and the post will be as well, in a moment.
Thank you! I’m so happy to have a community where things like this happen.
Are you in agreement with my description of Lincoln as a dictator below? He’s less benevolent than FDR but I’d still call him benevolent and he’s a more clear dictator.
Lincoln’s a little more borderline, but so far as I’m aware, he didn’t do anything to mess with the 1864 elections; I think most people would think that that keeps him on the non-dictator end of the spectrum
Of course, the validity of that election was based on a document that he was actively violating at the time, so there definitely seems to be room for debate.
In addition, there’s the fact that most of the Southern States couldn’t vote at the time. It was basically unthinkable that he could have lost the elections. Democratic and dictatorial aren’t natural types, but I’d say Lincoln is at least as far in the dictatorial direction as Putin, Nazarbayev, or almost any other basically sane ex-Soviet leader.
I’m seriously inclined to down-vote the whole comment community on this one except for Peter, though I won’t, for their failure to challenge such an overt assertion of such an absurd claim.
I didn’t challenge it because I didn’t find it absurd. I’ve asked myself in the past whether I could think of heads of state whose orders & actions were untarnished enough that I could go ahead and call them “benevolent” without caveats, and I drew a blank.
I’d guess my definition of a benevolent leader is less inclusive than yours; judging by your child comment it seems as if you’re interpreting “benevolent dictator” as meaning simply “dictators who wanted good results and got them”. To me “benevolent” connotes not only good motives & good policies/behaviour but also a lack of very bad policies/behaviour. Other posters in this discussion might’ve interpreted it like I did.
Possibly. OTOH, the poster seems to have been convinced. I draw a blank on people, dictators or not, who don’t engage in very bad policies/behavior on whatever scale they are able to act on. No points for inaction in my book.
I know somebody who used to work for Lee Kuan Yew, who has testified that in quite a few ways he at least has been corrupted (things such as creating a slush fund, giving a man who saved his life a public house he didn’t qualify for etc).
If your standard of corruption is that stringent, you could probably make a case for Barack Obama being corrupted—the Rezko below-market-price business, his aunt getting asylum and public housing, etc.
(And someone like George W. Bush is even easier; Harken Energy, anyone?)
Um, you’re going to have a hard time claiming Obama isn’t corrupted, or that he was uncorrupt to begin with. (As you mention, such a claim is even harder for Bush.)
If the standard makes ALL leaders corrupt it doesn’t favor democratic over dictatorial ones, nor is it a very useful standard. Relative to their power, are the benefits Obama, Lee Kuan Yew or even Bush skim greater than those typical Americans seek in an antisocial manner? Even comparable?
If the standard makes ALL leaders corrupt it doesn’t favor democratic over dictatorial ones, nor is it a very useful standard.
Useful for what? I agree it’s not terribly useful for choosing whether person A or person B should hold role X, but I feel that question is a distraction- your design of role X is more important than your selection of a person to fill that role. And so the question of how someone acquired power is less interesting to me than the power that person has, and I think the link between the two is a lot weaker than people expect.
I’m presenting a dilemma. Either your standards for corruption are so high that you have to call both Yew & Obama corrupt, or your standards are loose enough that neither fits according to listed examples.
I prefer to bite the latter bullet, but if you want to bite the former, that’s your choice.
Isn’t the intelligent solution to talk about degrees of corruption and minimisisation? Measures to increase transperancy over this sort of thing are almost certainly the solution to Obama-level corruption.
No, because that’s a much more complex argument. Start with the simplest thing that could possibly work. If you don’t reach any resolution or make any progress, then one can look into more sophisticated approaches.
The reason to look at it that way is because it deals with problems of what is or isn’t “corrupt” in general- instead, levels to get rid of (assuming one is in a position to supress corruption in the first place) can be set and corruption above a maximum level dealt with.
I flat-out disagree that power corrupts as the phrase is usually understood, but that’s a topic worthy of rational discussion (just not now with me).
The claim that there has never been a truly benevolent dictator though, that’s simply a religious assertion, a key point of faith in the American democratic religion and no more worthy of discussion than whether the Earth is old, at least for usual meanings of the word ‘benevolent’ and for meanings of ‘dictator’ which avoid the no true Scotsman fallacy. There have been benevolent democratically elected leaders in the usual sense too. How confident do you think you should be that the latter are more common than the former though? Why?
I’m seriously inclined to down-vote the whole comment community on this one except for Peter, though I won’t, for their failure to challenge such an overt assertion of such an absurd claim. How many people would have jumped in against the claim that without belief in god there can be no morality or public order, that the moral behavior of secular people is just a habit or hold-over from Christian times, and that thus that all secular societies are doomed? To me it’s about equally credible.
BTW, just from the 20th century there are people from Ataturk to FDR to Lee Kuan Yew to Deng Chou Ping. More generally, more or less The Entire History of the World especially East Asia are counter-examples.
If this is a plea to be let alone on the topic, then, feel free to ignore my comment below—I’m posting in case third parties want to respond.
Perhaps it’s phrased poorly. There have certainly been plenty of dictators who often meant well and who often, on balance, did more good than harm for their country—but such dictators are rare exceptions, and even these well-meaning, useful dictators may not have been “truly” benevolent in the sense that they presided over hideous atrocities. Obviously a certain amount of illiberal behavior is implicit in what it means to be a dictator—to argue that FDR was non-benevolent because he served four terms or managed the economy with a heavy hand would indeed involve a “no true Scotsman” fallacy. But a well-intentioned, useful, illiberal ruler may nevertheless be surprisingly bloody, and this is a warning that should be widely and frequently promulgated, because it is true and important and people tend to forget it.
*Ataturk is often accused of playing a leading role in the Armenian genocide, and at the very least seems to have been involved in dismissing courts that were trying war criminals without providing replacement courts, and in conquering territories where Armenians were massacred shortly after the conquest.
*Deng Chou Ping was probably the most powerful person in China at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacres, and it is not clear that he exerted any influence to attempt to disperse the protesters peacefully or even with a minimum of violence: tanks were used in urban areas and secret police hunted down thousands of dissidents even after the protests had ended. One might have hoped that a benevolent illiberal ruler, when confronted with peaceful demands for democracy, would simply say “No.” and ignore the protesters except in so far as they were creating a public nuisance.
*FDR presided over the internment of hundreds of thousands of American citizens in concentration camps solely on the basis of race, as well as the firebombing of Dresden, Hamburg, and Tokyo. The first conflagration of a residential area could have been an accident, but there is no evidence of which I am aware that the Allies ever took steps to prevent tens of thousands of civilians from being burnt alive, such as, e.g., taking care to only bomb non-urban industrial targets on hot, dry, summer days. Although Hitler is surely far more responsible than FDR for the Holocaust, a truly benevolent ruler would probably have spared an air raid or two to cut the railroad tracks that led from Jewish ghettos to German death camps. Whatever you might think about FDR’s leadership (I would not presume to judge him or to say that I could have done better in his place), it was surprisingly bloody for a benevolent person.
Lee Kuan Yew seems to have been a fairly good dictator, but in his autobiography, he claims to have directly benefited from the US’s war efforts in Vietnam, and he says that he would not have remained in power but for the US efforts. For its part, the US State Department explicitly claimed that the Vietnam war was intended to prevent countries like Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore from falling like dominoes after a possible Communization of Vietnam. Although it would probably be unfair to lay moral culpability for, e.g., Mai Lai or Agent Orange on Lee Kuan Yew (and thus I do not say he is in any way to blame), it is still worth noting that Yew’s dictatorship was indirectly maintained by years of surprisingly bloody violence. Thus, Yew may be an exception that proves the rule—even when you yourself, as an aspiring dictator, do not get your hands bloody as power corrupts you, it is possible that you are saved from bloody hands only by a friend who gets his hands bloody for you.
I simply deny the assertion that dictators who wanted good results and got them were rare exceptions. Citation needed.
Admittedly, dictators have frequently presided over atrocities, unlike democratic rulers who have never presided over atrocities such as slavery, genocide, or more recently, say the Iraq war, Vietnam, or in an ongoing sense, the drug war or factory farming.
Human life is bloody. Power pushes the perceived responsibility for that brute fact onto the powerful. People are often scum, but avoiding power doesn’t actually remove their responsibility. Practically every American can save lives for amounts of money which are fairly minor to them. What are the relevant differences between them and French aristocrats who could have done the same? I see one difference. The French aristocrats lived in a Malthusian world where tehy couldn’t really have impacted total global suffering with the local efforts available?
How is G.W. Bush more corrupt than the people who elected him. He seems to care more for the third world poor than they do, and not obviously less for rule of law or the welfare of the US.
Playing fast and loose with geopolitical realities, (Iraq is only slightly about oil, for instance) I’d like to conclude with the observation that even when you yourself, as a middle class American, don’t get your hands bloody as cheap oil etc corrupt you, it is possible that you are saved from bloody hands by an elected representative who you hired to do the job.
The standards of evaluation of goodness should be specified in greater detail first. Else it is quite difficult to tell whether e.g. Atatürk was really benevolent or not, even if we agree on goodness of his individual actions. Some of the questions
are the points scored by getting desired good results cancelled by the atrocities, and to what extent?
could a non-dictatorial regime do better (given the conditions in the specific country and historical period), and if no, can the dictator bear full responsibility for his deeds?
what amount of goodness makes a dictator benevolent?
Unless we first specify the criteria, the risk of widespread rationalisation in this discussion is high.
Upvoted for the umlaut!
That was perhaps the cheapest upvote I ever got. Thanks. (Unfortunately Ceauşescu was anything but benevolent, else he would be mentioned and I could gather additional upvotes for the comma.)
It’s hard to find proof of what most people consider obvious, unless its part of the Canon of Great Moments in Science (tm) and the textbook industry can make a bundle off it. Tell you what—if you like, I’ll trade you a promise to look for the citation you want for a promise to look for primary science on anthropogenic global warming. I suspect we’re making the climate warmer, but I don’t know where to read a peer-reviewed article documenting the evidence that we are. I’ll spend any reasonable amount of time that you do looking -- 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 90 minutes—and if I can’t find anything, I’ll admit to being wrong.
Slavery, genocide, and factory farming are examples of imperfect democracy—the definition of “citizen” simply isn’t extended widely enough yet. Fortunately, people (slowly) tend to notice the inconsistency in times of relative peace and prosperity, and extend additional rights. Hence the order-of-magnitude decrease in the fraction of the global population that is enslaved, and, if you believe Stephen Pinker, in the frequency of ethnic killings. As for factory farming, I sincerely hope the day when animals are treated as citizens when appropriate will come, and the quicker it comes the better I’ll be pleased. On the other hand, if you glorify dictatorship, or if you give dictatorship an opening to glorify itself, it tends to pretty effectively suppress talk about widening the circle of compassion. Better to have a hypocritical system of liberties than to let vice walk the streets without paying any tribute to virtue at all; such tributes can collect compound interest over the centuries.
The Vietnam war is generally recognized as a failure of democracy; the two most popular opponents of the war were assassinated, and the papers providing the policy rationale for the war were illegally hidden, ultimately causing the downfall of President Nixon. The drug war seems to be winding down as the high cost of prisons sinks in. The war on Iraq is probably democracy’s fault.
True enough, but it also pushes some of the real responsibility onto the powerful. I would much rather kill one person than stand by and let ten die, but I would much rather let one person die than kill one person—responsibility counts for something.
God forbid, if you’ll excuse the expression. I’m not paying anybody to butcher for me, although sometimes, despite my best efforts, they take my tax dollars for the purpose. So far as I can manage it without being thrown in jail, it’s not in my name; I vote against any incumbent that commits atrocities, and campaign for people who promise not to, and buy renewable energy from the power company and fair-trade imports from the third world and humanely-labeled meat from the supermarket. I’m sure that I still benefit from all kinds of bloody shenanigans, but it’s not because I want to.
Finally, are you any relation to Michael Vassar, the political philosopher and scholar of just war theory? You seem to have a mind that is open like his, and a similarly agile debating style, but you also seem considerably bitterer than his published works.
Good writing style!
I don’t think I glorify dictatorship, but I do think that terribly dictatorships, like Stalinist Russia, have sometimes spoken of widening circles of compassion.
I do think you are glorifying democracy. Do you have examples of perfect democracy to contrast with imperfect democracy? Slaves frequently aren’t citizens, but on other occasions, such as in the immense and enslaving US prison system (with its huge rates of false conviction and of conviction for absurd crimes), or the military draft they are. The reduction in slavery may be due to philosophical progress trickling down to the masses, or it may simply be that slavery has become less economically competitive as markets have matured.
Responsibility counts for something, but for far less among the powerful. As power increases, custom weakens, and situations become more unique, acts/omissions distinctions become less useful. As a result, rapid rises in power do frequently leave people without a moral compass, leading to terrible actions.
I appreciate your efforts to avoid indirectly causing harms.
I didn’t know about the other Michael Vassar. It’s an uncommon name, so I’m surprised to hear it.
By which you mean, I suppose, that my skill as a rhetorician has exceeded my skill as a rationalist. Well, you may be right. Supposing you are, what do you suggest I do about it?
Well, yes, I am. Not our democracy, not any narrow technique for promoting democracy, but democracy as the broad principle that people should have a decisive say in the decisions that affect them strikes me as pretty awesome. I guess I might be claiming benefits for democracy in excess of what I have evidence to support, and that if I were an excellent rationalist, I would simply say, “I do not know what the effects of attempting democracy are.”
I am not an excellent rationalist. What I do is to look hard for the answers to important questions, and then, if after long searching I cannot find the answers and I have no hope of finding the answers, but the questions still seem important, I choose an answer that appeals to my intuition.
I spent the better part of my undergraduate years trying to understand what democracy is, what violence is, and whether the two have any systematic relation to each other. Scientifically speaking, my answer is that we do not know, and will not know, in all likelihood, for quite some time. Violence happens in places where researchers find it difficult or impossible to record it; death tolls are so biased by partisans of various stripes, by the credulity of an entertainment-based media, and by the fog of war that one can almost never tell which of two similarly-sized conflicts was more violent. Democracy is, at best, a correlation among several variables, each of which can only be specified with 2 or 3 bits of meaningful information, and each of which might have different effects on violence. Given the confusion, to scientifically state a relationship between democracy and violence would be ridiculous.
And, yet, I find that I very much want to know what the relationship is between democracy and violence. I can oppose all offensive wars designed to change another country’s regime type on the grounds that science supports no prediction that the certain deaths from war will be outweighed by bloodiness removed in an allegedly safer regime. What about defensive wars? I find that I cannot bring myself to say, “I would not fight to preserve my region’s measure of democracy against an outside autocratic invader, because I do not know, scientifically, that such a fight would reduce total bloodiness.” I would fight, believing without scientific evidence that such a war would be better than surrender.
Am I simply deluding myself? Most people on Less Wrong will think so. I do not particularly care. I am far more concerned about the danger of reasoning myself into a narcissistic, quiet-ist corner where I never take political action than I am about the danger of backing an ideal that turns out to be empty.
Using the Hansonian “far-view reference class,” the odds that an ideal chosen based on “things I believe in because I was taught to believe in them” is worth killing for are near zero. Using the same method, the odds that an ideal chosen based on “things that I believe in after carefully examining all available evidence and finding that I cannot think of a good reason to overturn my culture’s traditions, despite having actively questioned them” is worth killing for are high enough that I can sleep at night. If you believe I should be awake, I look forward to your reply.
Not at all. Rhetorical skill IS a good thing, and properly contributes to logic. Your argument seems rational to me, in the non-Spock sense that we generally encourage here. What to do? Keep on thinking AND caring!
If the search you use is as fair and unbiased as you can make it, this looking hard for answers is the core of what being a good rationalist is. Possibly, you should look harder for the causes of systematic differences between people’s intuitions, to see whether those causes are entangled with truth, but analysis has to stop at some point.
In practice, rationalists may back themselves into permanent inaction due to uncertainty, but the theory of rationality we endorse here says we should be doing what you claim to be doing. I find it extremely disturbing that we aren’t communicating this effectively, though its clearly our fault since we aren’t communicating it effectively enough to ourselves for it to motivate us to be more dynamic either.
When you say you glorify Democracy though, I think you mean something much closer to what I would call Coherent Extrapolated Volition than it is to what I would call Democracy. Something radically novel that hasn’t ever been tried, or even specified in enough detail to call it a proposal without some charity.
As a factual matter, I would suggest that the systems of government that we call Democracies in the US may typically be a bit further in the CEV direction than those we typically call dictatorships, but if they are, its a weak tendency, like the tendency of good painters to be good at basketball or something. You might detect it statistically, if you had properly operationalized it first, or vaguely suspect its there based on intuitive perception, but you couldn’t ever be very confident it was there.
It’s obviously wrong to overturn cultural traditions which have been questioned but not refuted. Such traditions have some information value, if only for anthropic reasons, and more importantly, they are somewhat correlated with your values. In this particular case, if you limit your options under consideration to ‘fight against invaders or do nothing’ I have no objections. Real life situations usually present more options, but those weren’t specified.
As an off-the-cuff example, I think its obvious that a person who fought against the NAZIs in WWII was doing something better than they would by staying home even though the NAZIs didn’t invade the US and even valuing their lives moderately more highly than those of others. OTOH, the marginal expected impact of a soldier on the expected outcome of the war was surely SO MUCH less than the marginal expected impact of an independent person who put in serious effort to be an assassin, while the risk was probably not an order of magnitude smaller, so I think its fair to say that they were still being irrational, judged as altruists, and were in most cases, well, only following orders. If they valued victory enough to be a soldier they should have done something more effective instead. (have I just refuted Yossarian or confirmed him?)
I think that they should definitely sleep at night. Should feel happy and proud even… but in their shoes I wouldn’t.
Whole thread voted up BTW.
Thanks! Wholeheartedly agree, btw.
I think you’re referring to Michael Walzer.
Right! Thank you.
I don’t know if you’re still looking for this, and if this would be an appropriate place to post links. But:
Primary Evidence:
temperatures increase over the last 2000 years as estimated by tree ring, marine/lake/cave proxy, ice isotopes, glacier length/mass, and borehole data. figures S-1, O-4, 2-3, 2-5, 5-3, 6-3, 7-1, 10-4, and 11-2 are probably the most useful to you. Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years. Committee on Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years, National Research Council ISBN: 0-309-66144-7, 160 pages, 7 x 10, (2006)
anomalies in combined land-surface air and sea-surface water temperature increase significantly 1880-2009. Global-mean monthly, seasonal, and annual means, 1880-present, updated through most recent month. NASA Goddard. [GISS Surface Temperature Analysis][http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/)
Other Supporting evidence:
earlier flowering times in recent 25 years, with data taken over the past 250 years. Amano, et. al [A 250-year index of first flowering dates and its response to temperature changes] (http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/277/1693/2451.full). Proc. R. Soc. B 22 August 2010 vol. 277 no. 1693 2451-2457
Contradicting evidence:
extremes of monthly average temperatures in Central England do not appear to match either a “high extremes after 1780s/1850s only” or “low extremes before 1780s/1850s only” hypothesis. Manley. [Central England temperatures: Monthly means 1659 to 1973] (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/qj.49710042511/abstract). Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society. Volume 100, Issue 425, pages 389–405, July 1974
Hope that’s helpful.
factory farming? huh?
In America, we have grown jaded towards protests because they don’t ever accomplish anything. But at their most powerful, protests become revolutions. If Deng would have just ignored the protesters indefinitely, the CCP would have fallen. Perhaps the protest could have been dispersed without loss of life, but it’s only very recently that police tactics have advanced to the point of being able to disburse large groups of defensively-militarized protesters without killing people. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_model and compare to the failure of the police at the Seattle WTO protests of 1999.
This is a recent story about Deng’s supposed backing of Tiananmen violence. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/05/world/asia/05china.html?_r=1
MichaelVassar:
I was tempted to challenge it, but I decided that it’s not worth to open such an emotionally charged can of worms.
These are some good remarks and questions, but I’d say you’re committing a fallacy when you contrast dictators with democratically elected leaders as if it were some sort of dichotomy, or even a typically occurring contrast. There have been many non-democratic political arrangements in human history other than dictatorships. Moreover, it’s not at all clear that dictatorships and democracies should be viewed as disjoint phenomena. Unless we insist on a No-True-Scotsman definition of democracy, many dictatorships, including quite nasty ones, have been fundamentally democratic in the sense of basing their power on majority popular support.
Good point. For example, if you squint hard enough, the choosing of a council or legislature through lots as was done for a time in the Venetian state, is “democratic” in that everyone in some broad class (the people eligible to be chosen at random) had an equal chance to participate in the government, but would not meet with the approval of most modern advocates of democracy, even though IMHO it is worth trying again.
The Venetians understood that some of the people chosen by lot would be obviously incompent at governing, so their procedure alternated phases in which a group was chosen by lot with phases in which the group that is the output of the previous phase vote to determine the makeup of the input to the next phase with the idea that the voting phases would weed out those who were obviously incompetent. So, though there was voting, it was done only by the relatively tiny number of people who had been selected by lot—and (if we ignore information about specific individuals) they had the same chance of becoming a legislator as the people they were voting on.
IMHO probably the worst effect of Western civilization’s current overoptimism about democracy will be to inhibit experiments in forms of non-democratic government that would not have been possible before information technology (including the internet) became broadly disseminated. (Of course such experiments should be small in scale till they have built up a substantial track record.)
rhollerith_dot_com:
I beg to differ. The worst effect is that throughout recent history, democratic ideas have regularly been foisted upon peoples and places where the introduction of democratic politics was a perfect recipe for utter disaster. I won’t even try to quantify the total amount of carnage, destruction, and misery caused this way, but it’s certainly well above the scale of those political mass crimes and atrocities that serve as the usual benchmarks of awfulness nowadays. Of course, all this normally gets explained away with frantic no-true-Scotsman responses whenever unpleasant questions are raised along these lines.
For full disclosure, I should add that I care particularly strongly about this because I was personally affected by one historical disaster that was brought about this way, namely the events in former Yugoslavia. Regardless of what one thinks about who bears what part of the blame for what happened there, one thing that’s absolutely impossible to deny is that all the key players enjoyed democratic support confirmed by free elections.
Seconded. I live in Russia, and if you compare the well-being of citizens in Putin’s epoch against Yeltsin’s, Putin wins so thoroughly that it’s not even funny.
You could attribute the difference to many correlated features, such as the year beginning with “20” instead of “19″.
Also: The economy in Yeltsin’s day was unusually bad, in deep recession due to pre-collapse economic problems, combined with the difficulties of switching over. In addition, today’s economy benefits from a relatively high price for oil.
That would be a less absurdist version of my point.
I assumed you meant that economic growth (in general) meant that the wellbeing of people is generally going to be greater when the year count is greater. I was providing specific reasons why the economy at the time would have been worse than regressing economic growth would suggest, other than political leadership.
Yes, that is a very bad effect of the overoptimism about democracy.
Another example: even the vast majority of those (the non-whites) who could not vote in Rhodesia were significantly better off than they came to be after the Jimmy Carter administration forced the country (now called Zimbabwe) to give them the vote.
I agree with everything in your paragraph. The important distinction between states as I see it is more between totalitarian and non-totalitarian than between democratic and non-democratic, as the latter tends to be a fairly smooth continuum. I was working within the local parlance for an American audience.
I agree that statements like all As are Bs are likely to be only approximately true and if you look you will find counter examples. But… ‘power corrupts’ is a fairly reliable rule of thumb as rules of thumb go. I include a couple of refs that took all of 3 minutes to find although I couldn’t find the really good one that I noticed a year or so ago.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1298606 abstract: We investigate the effect of power differences and associated expectations in social decision-making. Using a modified ultimatum game, we show that allocators lower their offers to recipients when the power difference shifts in favor of the allocator. Remarkably, however, when recipients are completely powerless, offers increase. This effect is mediated by a change in framing of the situation: when the opponent is without power, feelings of social responsibility are evoked. On the recipient side, we show that recipients do not anticipate these higher outcomes resulting from powerlessness. They prefer more power over less, expecting higher outcomes when they are more powerful, especially when less power entails powerlessness. Results are discussed in relation to empathy gaps and social responsibility.
http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2010/01/power.php from J Lehrer’s comments: The scientists argue that power is corrupting because it leads to moral hypocrisy. Although we almost always know what the right thing to do is—cheating at dice is a sin—power makes it easier to justify the wrongdoing, as we rationalize away our moral mistake.
Somewhat relevant:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1548222
I can think of a number of reasons why monarchs may suffer somewhat less from the ‘power corrupts’ norm. (1) often educated from childhood to use power wisely (2) often feel their power is legit and therefore less fearful of overthrow (3) tend to get better ‘press’ than other autocrats so that abuse of power less noticeable (4) often have continuity and structure in their advisors inherited from previous monarch.
Despite this, there have been some pretty nasty monarchs through history—even ones that are thought of as great like Good Queen Bess. However, if I had to live in an autocratic state I would prefer an established monarchy, all others things being equal.
Voted up for using data, though I’m very far from convinced by the specific data. The first seems irrelevant or at best very weakly suggestive. Regarding the second, I’m pretty confident that scientists profoundly mis-understand what sort of thing hypocrisy is as a consequence of the same profound misunderstanding of what sort of thing mind is which lead to the failures of GOFAI. I guess I also think they misunderstand what corruption is, though I’m less clear on that.
It’s really critical that we distinguish power corrupting from fear and weakness producing pro-social submission and from fearful people invoking morality to cover over cowardice. In the usual sense of the former concept corruption is something that should be expected, for instance, to be much more gradual. One should really notice that heroes in stories for adults are not generally rule-abiding, and frequently aren’t even typically selfless. Acting more antisocial, like the people you actually admire (except when you are busy resenting their affronts to you) do, because like them you are no longer afraid is totally different from acting like people you detest.
I don’t think that “power corrupts” is a helpful approximation at the level of critical thinking ability common here. (what models are useful depends on what other models you have).
Perhaps it would be more accurate to state “The structural dynamics of dictatorial regimes demands coercion be used, while decentralized power systems allow dissent”; even the Philosopher King must murder upstarts who would take the throne. Mass Driver’s comments (below) support this, with Lee Kuan Yew’s power requiring violent coercion being performed on his behalf, and the examples of Democratic Despotism largely boil down to a lack of accountability and transparency in the elected leaders—essentially they became (have become) too powerful.
“Power corrupts” is just the colloquial form.
(It is possible that I am in a Death Spiral with this idea, but this analysis occurred to me spontaneously—I didn’t go seeking out an explanation that fit my theory)
Voted up for precision.
I see decentralization of power as less relevant than regime stability as an enabler of non-violence. Kings in long-standing monarchies, philosophical or not, need use little violence. New dictators (classically called tyrants) need use much violence. In addition, they have the advantage of having been selected for ability and the disadvantage of having been poorly educated for their position.
Of course, power ALWAYS scales up the impact of your actions. Lets say that I’m significantly more careful than average. In that case, my worst actions include doing things that have a .1% chance of killing someone every decade. Scale that up by ten million and its roughly equivalent to killing ten thousand people once during a decade long reign over a mid-sized country. I’d call that much better than Lincoln (who declared marshal law and was an elected dictator if Hitler was one) or FDR but MUCH worse than Deng. OTOH, Lincoln and FDR lived in an anarchy, the international community, and I don’t. I couldn’t be as careful/scrupulous as I am if I lived in an anarchy.
While I’d disagree with your description of FDR as a dictator, you’re quite right about Ataturk, and your other examples expose my woefully insufficient knowledge of non-Western history. My belief has been updated, and the post will be as well, in a moment.
Thanks.
Thank you! I’m so happy to have a community where things like this happen. Are you in agreement with my description of Lincoln as a dictator below? He’s less benevolent than FDR but I’d still call him benevolent and he’s a more clear dictator.
Lincoln’s a little more borderline, but so far as I’m aware, he didn’t do anything to mess with the 1864 elections; I think most people would think that that keeps him on the non-dictator end of the spectrum
Of course, the validity of that election was based on a document that he was actively violating at the time, so there definitely seems to be room for debate.
In addition, there’s the fact that most of the Southern States couldn’t vote at the time. It was basically unthinkable that he could have lost the elections. Democratic and dictatorial aren’t natural types, but I’d say Lincoln is at least as far in the dictatorial direction as Putin, Nazarbayev, or almost any other basically sane ex-Soviet leader.
I didn’t challenge it because I didn’t find it absurd. I’ve asked myself in the past whether I could think of heads of state whose orders & actions were untarnished enough that I could go ahead and call them “benevolent” without caveats, and I drew a blank.
I’d guess my definition of a benevolent leader is less inclusive than yours; judging by your child comment it seems as if you’re interpreting “benevolent dictator” as meaning simply “dictators who wanted good results and got them”. To me “benevolent” connotes not only good motives & good policies/behaviour but also a lack of very bad policies/behaviour. Other posters in this discussion might’ve interpreted it like I did.
Possibly. OTOH, the poster seems to have been convinced. I draw a blank on people, dictators or not, who don’t engage in very bad policies/behavior on whatever scale they are able to act on. No points for inaction in my book.
I know somebody who used to work for Lee Kuan Yew, who has testified that in quite a few ways he at least has been corrupted (things such as creating a slush fund, giving a man who saved his life a public house he didn’t qualify for etc).
That doesn’t sound very corrupted to me.
If your standard of corruption is that stringent, you could probably make a case for Barack Obama being corrupted—the Rezko below-market-price business, his aunt getting asylum and public housing, etc.
(And someone like George W. Bush is even easier; Harken Energy, anyone?)
Um, you’re going to have a hard time claiming Obama isn’t corrupted, or that he was uncorrupt to begin with. (As you mention, such a claim is even harder for Bush.)
If the standard makes ALL leaders corrupt it doesn’t favor democratic over dictatorial ones, nor is it a very useful standard. Relative to their power, are the benefits Obama, Lee Kuan Yew or even Bush skim greater than those typical Americans seek in an antisocial manner? Even comparable?
Useful for what? I agree it’s not terribly useful for choosing whether person A or person B should hold role X, but I feel that question is a distraction- your design of role X is more important than your selection of a person to fill that role. And so the question of how someone acquired power is less interesting to me than the power that person has, and I think the link between the two is a lot weaker than people expect.
I’m presenting a dilemma. Either your standards for corruption are so high that you have to call both Yew & Obama corrupt, or your standards are loose enough that neither fits according to listed examples.
I prefer to bite the latter bullet, but if you want to bite the former, that’s your choice.
Isn’t the intelligent solution to talk about degrees of corruption and minimisisation? Measures to increase transperancy over this sort of thing are almost certainly the solution to Obama-level corruption.
No, because that’s a much more complex argument. Start with the simplest thing that could possibly work. If you don’t reach any resolution or make any progress, then one can look into more sophisticated approaches.
The reason to look at it that way is because it deals with problems of what is or isn’t “corrupt” in general- instead, levels to get rid of (assuming one is in a position to supress corruption in the first place) can be set and corruption above a maximum level dealt with.