[cmurf]

It's a combination of corporate money in politics, and a nation of spectators, not citizens. The citizens have yielded their participation and power to corporations, on purpose, and many are proud that they've done this, if they care at all.

It's only hindsight being 20/20 that they go, oh fuck that was a bad idea, how did we get here? Complacency.

No one said democracy was easy. It requires constant vigilance. And people are too happy to be entertained by other things. Of course the better system would be the benevolent dictator for a push button operation, the small problem is they're not benevolent for very long.

[buvanshak]

> the small problem is they're not benevolent for very long.

Would it be possible to appoint a dictator, who has no other incentive other then serve the people. For ex, they ll sever every human relation, cannot own property, will have zero privacy, cannot reproduce and have children etc. But they ll be held to the highest honor and their every needs taken care of...

In short, something like the life of a religious saint or a nun.

[spc476]

CGP Grey did a video about political power: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

Short answer: your idea probably won't last long.

[headhunter]

You've described an AI politician. Doesn't sound so bad now, huh?

Will you turn over your leadership to the machines? Humans are so bad at it.

[indigochill]

>Will you turn over your leadership to the machines?

Translates to: Will you turn over your leadership to the humans running the machines?

I like the theory of a perfectly impartial AI dictator. However, I don't believe such a thing is possible since it must be programmed by people and carries any biases (deliberate or accidental) those people program into it.

[evanlivingston]

Power corrupts.

[cmurf]

No.

Read Hobbes' Leviathan, it discusses this. A prerequisite for success the sovereign must establish a state religion, subjects comply or are executed.

And then John Locke, with emphasis on consent of the governed.

And why not the Catholic Church? The pope is essentially what you describe but they have been many bad Popes. Nevertheless as an institution it endures, with and without justice.

A sovereign who is completely selfless would not be a human. So you're necessarily searching for deities or an off worlder. And when they're done? Who then? Sounds chaotic and capricious.

[buvanshak]

>A sovereign who is completely selfless would not be a human.

All human beings have survival instincts. But we manages to build soldiers that are willing to risk their lives for random stuff. Right?

In such way, it might be possible to build, or grow, generations of such people, completely selfless..

[mtreis86]

Random stuff isn't what soldiers risk their lives for. Many see their community as an extension of their family. Others are idealistic. Some didn't realize the risk. It isn't random though.

[buvanshak]

> Random stuff isn't what soldiers risk their lives for.

I mean orders from higher authorities. Are the soldiers given reason or entitled for one? They are just supposed to obey, right?

[mtreis86]

Yes they are given reasons, volunteers tend to fight better that way. They are supposed to obey but they, in the USA anyways, swore to protect the constitution.

"They suffered and they did their duty so a sheltered homeland can enjoy the peace that was purchased at such a high cost." Eugene Sledge

[freeflight]

While it might not have been your intention, you pretty much described the Hitlerjugend there, indoctrination of children for a "bigger cause".

Even if the cause might be a good one, we still value our individuality over mass enforced and indoctrinated conformism. It might be anything but harmonic, and quite chaotic, but individuality gives us a diversity of ideas and views, thus enabling adaptability, which is one of homo sapiens sapiens biggest advantages.

[golergka]

The most horrible and bloody dictators had only the best intentions in mind. The most bloody and horrible ideology in the world – communism – was driven by idealists.

I'll always take a corrupt politician over a benevolent dictator.

[KozmoNau7]

>"The most bloody and horrible ideology in the world – communism"

Please provide some support for that deeply subjective statement.

https://aeon.co/essays/the-merits-of-taking-an-anti-anti-com...

[AnimalMuppet]

Most bloody? That's objectively true, in terms of total body count, and especially total body count of their own citizens. (Most bloody in terms of deaths per person per year that they had the opportunity to kill is probably the Nazis - although Cambodian Communism, if considered separately from all of communism, probably tops even the Nazis.)

Most horrible? It doesn't seem unreasonable to use body count of a country's own citizens as a proxy for "horror".

[KozmoNau7]

You're lumping a lot of different ideologies together under one umbrella term, even though 1) they were wildly different in practice and implementation, and 2) most of them only paid the tiniest bit of lip service to what Marx envisioned, and 3) were actually just good old tyrannical dictatorships, falsely using the promise of communistic ideals to pacify the populace.

Did you read the article?

I've found it a very common tendency to lump everything free market capitalists don't like as "communism bad!" and "socialism bad!", which I guess stems from decades and decades of cultural indoctrination, fueled by the military industrial complex.

For instance, an anarcho-communist is very far from whatever haphazard centrally planned mess was in place in the USSR at any given time.

[golergka]

> most of them only paid the tiniest bit of lip service to what Marx envisioned

Oh, the old "no real scotsman" argument. See, the whole communist ideology is like convincing people to jump of a cliff so they can fly: when they inevitably fall to their death, you just tell that since they didn't fly, it wasn't what you envisioned.

Dictatorship and blood is the inevitable outcome of Marx's ideas executed on scale of millions. As inevitable as gravity.

[buvanshak]

>I'll always take a corrupt politician over a benevolent dictator.

Am I wrong in saying that if you have enough resources, corrupt politicians and authorities will let you dictate the affairs under them?

So a dictator, as you say exerciser their power to enforce their own agenda. While a corrupt politician sells them off to the highest bidder, to enforce what ever agenda they have...

The only thing better in that scenario is that the "highest bidder" may have an incentive to not kill droves of people, since they probably have a business to run, and that often require people..Also, business does not really have an ideology or a philosophy. It just need to grow its profits..

[AnimalMuppet]

In "A Reply to Professor Haldane", published in "Of Other Worlds", C.S. Lewis said the same thing as golergka. Lewis said that a robber baron may be satisfied with enough money (though I must say that history doesn't supply much hope of that). The robber baron may get lazy. And maybe, since on some level they know that what they do is morally sketchy, they may repent. But an idealist who holds their ideal or political theory with the force of a religion is far worse, because they commit their horrors in the name of doing good, and so their benevolent impulses seem to them to be temptations - something to be resisted in order to do what is "good".

[buvanshak]

In other words, a fool might end up doing more harm than a really cruel person. Of course.

> But an idealist who holds their ideal or political theory with the force of a religion is far worse, because they commit their horrors in the name of doing good, and so their benevolent impulses seem to them to be temptations - something to be resisted in order to do what is "good".

We are talking about a benevolent dictator here. If you are saying that they ll resist their benevolent impulses, how are they a benevolent dictator in the first place?

[AnimalMuppet]

"Benevolent" = "wanting to do good". But that applied (I think) even to the Communists. They wanted to free the proletariat from oppression. That was their moral imperative. To do it, they were willing to execute their "oppressors". The temptation to have mercy on some of the oppressors rather than execute them had to be resisted, because it would hinder the cause.

[Edit: reworded for clarity.]

[acqq]

The problem, independent of the ideology, is the quality of “checks and balances” which protect the human and other rights of the citizens.

And as we see, even in the USA as we speak it’s easy to take some rights from the people without too much fuss (just enough distraction).