STOP AUTHORITARIANISM

In the book, The Dictator’s Handbook, the authors explain why authoritarianism is, by nature, worse than democracy. This is because while in a democracy, the government needs to keep a large portion of the population happy to survive, in an authoritarian country, that number drops to less than one percent. In an authoritarian country, there are two tiers of people with influence: the influentials and the essentials. The influentials are the decently powerful people of the authoritarian country. They are the ones who chose the leader, for example, the royals in Saudi Arabia. These people are important because they are the elite class of the country, and it can’t function without them. While there is a large supply of oppressed, working class people, there are not that many of these. However, the most important people are the essentials. These are the most powerful people in a country, and there will generally be important military generals and other powerful people in them. These people alone can very easily topple the regime, so keeping them happy is the leader’s number one priority. 

Since the leader only cares about keeping the powerful people happy, the dictator generally does a couple things to do so, which hurts the people in the process. First, dictators generally try to keep the amount of people with power as small as possible. While this helps them by keeping the number of people who could potentially undermine them small, it also means that there are very few people who are able to live comfortable lives, while most have to live a very hard life. Another thing that dictators do is that they will always give resources to the people with more power. A starving farmer won’t be able to overthrow the government so the dictator will always put them last on the priority list. This means that wealth is concentrated among a very small number of people while everybody else struggles with poverty. 

In the end, dictatorships aren’t just worse than democracy because they oppress people, but because they are incentivized to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, leading to a huge imbalance between living conditions for those in democracies versus those in authoritarian countries. For example, when there were earthquakes in Iran, an authoritarian country, it killed 27,000 out of 97,000 people. However, in Chile, a democratic country, when an earthquake that was twenty-five times as bad hit a much bigger city, only 11 people died. This was because chile had incentive to build more sturdy buildings to protect the people while that simply wasn’t on the Iranian government’s mind.