[Mirror] A Dictator’s Guide to Ruling

NOTE: This is just a mirror of my old writing from 2018 for record-keeping purposes. 1) My current self does not consider this writing to carry useful insights, 2) I may no longer agree / believe with some of the details here, and 3) this is just poorly written.

AGAIN, you will NOT gain insights by reading this.

SECONDARY NOTE: I DO NOT SUPPORT DICTATORSHIP - THIS IS JUST A WRITTEN FORMAT OF CGP Grey’s “Rules for Rulers”.

Nobody can rule alone. No matter how skilled you are, you can’t pave the road, operate businesses, and run the military all by yourself. Because of this simple axiom, the person in power has to rely on other people to do these jobs for you. And from this, the ruler has an incentive to keep those working below him happy. Not following this rule will lead to people below you replacing you with someone that’ll make them keep more rewards than you. Your work as a successful ruler is to redistribute your nation’s wealth and keep people happy enough so that they won’t overthrow you.

As a nation has finite resources, there is only a finite amount of wealth you can distribute. So the first logical action is to cut down on unneccesary spending and minimize the number of people you need to distribute to.

Start by stop spending wealth to your citizens. Don’t worry, they can’t overthrow you. Just leave them just enough to stay alive but not much to keep them in eternal starvation. There is also no reason to keep their standard of living high either. Public schools only make them smart enough to start a revolution. Healthcare is also not needed because even if hundreds die, you still have millions left and thousands born every day. Focus on creating wealth by raw materials. Mining gold or diamonds from the ground doesn’t require the workers to be neither healthy or educated. If your country is abundant in oil instead of precious metals, cooperations from other countries will do the work for you, not your citizens. Every dollar spent on your citizens is a dollar that could have gone to people who keep you in power. If you start spending to your citizens then you will be quickly replaced by someone who promises to spend the dollar you’ve spent on citizens to their supporters.

You might think that you have the most loyal supporters but even if you do, your supporters still have the same problem just one step below. Your supporters also have to redistributed some of their wealth to their supporters. Not doing so will lead to them being overthrown and eventually you will be overthrown.

Now that you’ve maximized the amount of wealth you can distribute to your supporters you now have to minimize the number of your supporters. Keep the number of supporters just enough to keep your nation from failing but not much so that you start wasting wealth on unnecessary supporters. Your rival can always promise more to your crucial supporters than you. If you recently came into power by a revolution, now’s the time to start removing people not necessary to keeping you in power, even if they were crucial during the revolution. The revolution is over and they’ve now become useless. The amount of wealth you can distribute haven’t changed so that the number of people being distributed to has to be reduced. Failing this would mean less wealth going to your supporters compared to before the revolution. You’d promised a greater amount of wealth but that’s not what your supporters are seeing. They will overthrow you for someone who will do what you failed at.

Unfortunately even gold mining can’t be sustained by hunter-gatherer cavemen. You have to build infrastructure for your citizens. Better infrastructure leads to higher productivity even for raw material mining. You now build roads to transfer rocks from your mine and hospitals so that your workers can dig constantly without having a day off, maybe a few primitive schools to teach your workers how to work efficiently. You are building infrastructure not because you care for your citizens, but to increase productivity and the total wealth you can distribute to your supporters. You must also keep a careful balance of the infrastructure’s quality. Build too much and your citizens now have enough energy and knowledge for a revolution, build too less and you will be overthrown by your supporters, unhappy about their reduced wealth.

Your goal as a dictator is to remain in power as long as possible while preventing coups and revolutions from happening. Minimize the number of people wealth is distributed to, maximize the amount of total wealth distributed while preventing citizens from revolting, and your rule will be eternal.

This article was inspired by CGP Grey’s “Rules for Rulers”