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- Do you want to rule? Do you see the problems in your country and know how to fix them?
- If only you had the power to do so.
- Well, you've come to the right place.
- But before we begin this lesson in political power, ask yourself why don't rulers see as clearly as you...
- ...instead acting in such, selfish, self-destructive, short-sighted ways?
- Are they stupid… these most powerful people in the world?
- Or is it something else?
- The throne looks omnipotent from afar, but it is not as it seems.
- Take the throne to act, and the throne acts upon you.
- Accept that or turn back now before we discuss, the Rules for Rulers.
- *somber music*
- No matter how bright the rays of any sun king: No man rules alone.
- A king can’t build roads alone, can’t enforce laws alone, can't defend the nation or himself, alone.
- The power of a king is not to act, but to get others to act on his behalf, using the treasure in his vaults.
- A king needs an army, and someone to run it.
- Treasure and someone to collect it.
- Law and someone to enforce it.
- The individuals needed to make the necessary things happen are the king's keys to power.
- All the changes you wish to make are but thoughts in your head if the keys will not follow your commands.
- In a dictatorship, where might makes right, the number of keys to power is small, ...
- ...perhaps only a dozen generals, bureaucrats, and regional leaders.
- Sway them to your side and the power to rule is yours, but...
- ...never forget: displease them and they will replace you.
- Now all countries lie on a spectrum from those where the ruler needs few key supporters to those where the ruler needs many...
- ...this foundation of power is why countries are different.
- Yet many keys or few, the rules are the same:
- First, get the key supporters on your side.
- With them, you have the power to act; you have everything. Without them, you have nothing.
- Now in order to keep those keys to power, you must, second:
- Control the treasure.
- You must make sure your treasure is raised and distributed to you -- for all your hard work
- -- and to the keys needed to keep your position.
- This is your true work as a ruler: figuring out how best to raise and distribute resources,
- ...so as not to topple the house of cards upon which your throne sits.
- Now you, aspiring benevolent dictator, may want to help your citizens,...
- ...but your control of the treasure is what attracts rivals, so you must keep those keys loyal.
- But there is only so much treasure in your vaults, so much wealth your kingdom produces.
- So beware: every bit of treasure spent on citizens is treasure not spent on loyalty.
- Thus, doing the right thing, spending the wealth of the nation on the citizens of the nation,...
- ...hands a tool of power acquisition to your rivals.
- Treasure poured into roads, and universities, and hospitals, is treasure a rival can promise to key supporters if only they switch sides.
- Benevolent dictators can spend their take on the citizens, but the keys must get their rewards,...
- for *even if* you have gathered the most loyal, angelic supporters, they have the same problem as you, just one level down...
- Being a key to power is a position of power.
- They too must watch out for rivals from below or above: thus the treasure they get must also be spent to maintain their position.
- The loyal and dim may stay by your side no matter what,...
- ...but smart key supporters, will always watch the balance of power, ready to change allegiance if you look to be the loser in a shifting web of alliances.
- In countries where the keys are few, the rewards are great...
- ...and when violence rules, the most ruthless are attracted; and angels that build good works will lose to devils that don't.
- So buy all the loyalty you can, because loyalty, in dictatorial organizations of all kinds, is everything.
- For the ruler, anyway.
- Thus, the dictatorship exposed:
- A king who needs his court to raise the treasure to keep the court loyal and keep raising the treasure.
- This is the self-sustaining core of power, all outside is secondary.
- Now a king with many key supporters has real problems:
- not just their expense, but also their competing needs and rivalries are difficult to balance,...
- ...the more complicated the social and financial web between them all, the more able a rival is to sway a critical mass.
- The more key supporters a ruler has on average, the shorter their reign.
- Which brings us to the third rule for rulers:
- Minimize Key Supporters
- If a key in your court becomes unnecessary, his skills no longer required, you must kick him out.
- After a successful coup, the new dictator will purge some of those who helped him come to power,...
- ... while working with the underlings of the previous dictator -- which from the outside seems a terrible idea.
- Why abandon your fellow revolutionaries?
- Are the old dictator's supporters not a danger?
- But the keys necessary to gain power are not the same as those needed to keep it.
- Having someone on the payroll who was vital in the past, but useless now is the same as spending money on the citizens: treasure wasted on the irrelevant.
- And by definition, a dictator that pulls off a coup has promised greater treasure to those switching sides.
- The size of the vault has not changed, so the treasure must be split among fewer.
- A dictator that sways the right keys, takes control of the treasure, cuts unnecessary spending, kills unnecessary keys, will have a long and successful career.
- Seeing the structure unveiled, you might be excited to get started and control a country to the benefit of you and your cronies,...
- ...or you might be exhausted, wishing to do good but seeing the structural difficulties, now turn to democracy for salvation.
- So let us discuss rulers as representatives.
- You again might have grand dreams of the utopia you wish to build, but: no man rules alone.
- And never more so than in democracy.
- Presidents and Prime ministers must negotiate with their senates and parliaments and vice versa.
- And they all have their own key supporters to manage.
- In a well-designed democracy, power is fractured among many, and is taken not with force but with words,…
- … meaning you must get thousands or millions of citizens to if not like you on election day, …
- …at least like you better than the alternative.
- With so many voters and such fractured power it's impossible to, as a dictator would,…
- …follow these rules and buy loyalty. Or is it?
- Of course not.
- Don't think of citizens as individuals with their individual desires, but instead as divided into blocs:
- …the elderly, or homeowners, or business owners, or the poor. Blocs you can reward as a group.
- Democracies have wildly complicated tax codes, and laws, not as accident but as reward
- for the blocks that get and keep the ruling representatives in power:
- Farming subsidies, for example, have nothing to do with the food a nation needs, ...
- ...but entirely with how key the vote of the farming bloc is.
- Countries where farmers’ votes don't swing elections, don’t have farming subsidies.
- If a bloc doesn’t vote, such as younger citizens, then no need to divert rewards their way.
- Even if large in number, they are irrelevant to gaining power.
- Which is good news for you: one less block to sway and the treasure you give to your key blocks has to come from somewhere...
- If you want long years in office, rule three is your friend in a democracy just as much as a dictatorship.
- You can't eliminate those who don’t vote for you, but there is still much you can do.
- Once in power, make it easier for your key blocks to vote and harder for others.
- Establish voting systems that reduce the number of blocs you need to win the more rivals you get,…
- …very handy indeed.
- Draw election borders to predetermine the results for you or your cronies, …
- …and have party pre-elections with Byzantine rules to determine who blocs even *can* vote for.
- Mix and match the above for even better power perpetuation.
- When approval ratings couldn't be lower, yet re-election rates couldn't be higher,…
- … you'll know you've succeeded.
- Now, enough with thinking about the citizens.
- Even in a democracy there still are very influential individual key supporters
- ...you need on your side because their money or influence or favors keeps you in power.
- While you can’t just promise to give them treasure directly, as a dictator would,…
- …you can create loopholes for their investments, pass laws that they’ve written, …
- … or print get out of jail free cards for their actions.
- Not a wheelbarrow of gold to the door, but contracts for their business.
- You as ruler do have roads to build or computers to maintain or buildings to reconstruct.
- No man rules alone, after all.
- Or you could take the moral path, and ignore the big keys.
- But you'll fight against those who didn't. Good luck with that.
- Corruption is not some kind of petty crime, but rather a tool of power, …
- …in democracies and dictatorships, but more on that another time.
- So, accept the favors, sway the key blocs and you will get into power, …
- … ruling with actions that look contradictory and stupid to those who don't understand the game —
- privately helping a powerful industry you publicly denounced, …
- … or passing laws that hurt a bloc that voted for you.
- But your job isn’t to have a consistent understandable ruling policy, …
- … but to balance the interests of your keys to power, big and small.
- That is how you stay in office.
- Now with all this headache of being a representative, you may wonder,…
- … looking at rule three why couldn’t you skip all this bloc-building, favor trading nonsense …
- … and just bribe the army to take power?
- We must finally turn to: taxes and revolts.
- You must understand rule two and how the treasure is raised and used to hold a country together.
- If we graph the tax rate of countries vs the number of key supporters the ruler needs, …
- … there’s a clear relationship. More democracy, lower taxes.\
- If you're sitting comfortably in a cushy democracy you may scoff at this, …
- … but your fellow citizens who don’t earn enough don’t pay income taxes and get rebates, …
- … bringing the *average* tax rate down. In dictatorships, this doesn’t happen.
- Dictatorships often forgo tax paperwork in favor of just taking wealth directly.
- It’s common for the dictator to force farmers to sell their produce to him for little, …
- … then turn around and sell it on the open market,
- … pocketing the difference at an unthinkably high equivalent tax rate.
- So taxes in democracies are low in comparison to dictatorships.
- But why do representatives lower their take?
- Well, cutting taxes is a crowd pleaser.
- Dictators have no need to please the crowds and thus can take a large percentage from their poor citizens to pay key supporters.
- But representatives in a democracy can take a smaller percentage …
- from each to pay their key supporters, …
- … because their educated, freer citizens are more productive than peasants.
- For rulers in a democracy, the more productivity the better.
- Which is why they build universities and hospitals and roads and grant freedoms, …
- …not just out of the goodness of their hearts but because it increases citizen productiveness,…
- … which increases treasure for the ruler and their key supporters, even when a lower percentage is taken.
- Democracies are better places to live than dictatorships,…
- … not because representatives are better people,…
- … but because their needs *happen* to be aligned with a large portion of the population.
- The things that make citizens more productive also make their lives better.
- Representatives want everyone productive, so everyone gets highways.
- The worst dictators are those whose incentives are aligned with the fewest citizens, …
- … those who have the fewest keys to power.
- This explains why the worst dictatorships have something in common.
- Gold or oil or diamonds or similar.
- If the wealth of a nation is mostly dug out of the ground: it’s a terrible place to live…
- … because a gold mine can run with dying slaves, and still produce great treasure.
- Oil is harder, but luckily foreign companies can extract and refine it without any citizen involvement.
- With citizens outside this cycle, they can be ignored while the ruler is rewarded and the keys to power kept loyal.
- Thus we live in a world where the best, smartest democracies are stable, …
- …the worst, richest dictatorships are stable, and in between is a valley of revolution.
- The resource-rich dictators build roads only from their ports to their resources and from their palace to the airport, …
- … and the people stay quiet not because this is fine or even because they’re scared, …
- … but because the cold truth is: starving, disconnected, illiterates don't make good revolutionaries.
- Now a middling dictator without resources must, as mentioned before, take a large amount of wealth directly from his poor farmers and factory workers.
- Thus two roads won't do, and so he must maintain some minimums of life for the citizens.
- But keeping the work-force somewhat connected and somewhat educated and somewhat healthy …
- … makes them more able to revolt.
- Now understand: the romantic image of the people storming the gates and overthrowing their dictator is mostly a fantasy.
- If you run a middling dictatorship, the people only storm the palace when the army *lets them* to remove you, …
- … because you lost control over your keys and are being replaced.
- This is why after 'popular revolts’ in middling dictatorships, the new ruler is often the same as the old, if not worse.
- The people didn't replace the king, the court replaced the king, using the peoples' protest they let happen to do it.
- The very things a benevolent dictator wants to build to cross this valley …
- … take treasure away from the keys to power and make the citizens more able to revolt, …
- … often ending in a stronger ruler less likely to build bridges and more loyal to his keys.
- On the other side, the best democracies are stable not just because the large number of keys…
- … and their competing desires makes dictatorial revolt near-impossible to organize, …
- … but also because the revolt would destroy the very wealth it intended to capture.
- The high productivity of the citizens.
- Plus: those helping the would-be dictator in a democracy know he plans to cull key supporters once in power.
- That’s what’s a coup is.
- So potential key supporters must weigh the probability of surviving the cull and getting the rewards, …
- … versus the risk of being on the outside of a dictatorship they helped create.
- In a stable democracy, that’s a terrible gamble:
- maybe you'll be incredibly wealthy, …
- … but probably you'll be dead and have made the lives of everyone you know worse. The math says no.
- Being on the right side of a coup in a dictatorship means having the resources to get you and your family what the peasants lack.
- Health care, education, quality of life — this is what make the competition for power so fierce.
- But in a democracy most already have these things, so why risk it?
- So the more the wealth of a nation comes from the productive citizens of the nation, …
- … the more the power gets spread out and the more the ruler must maintain the quality of life for those citizens.
- The less, the less.
- Now if a stable democracy becomes very poor, …
- … or if a resource that dwarfs the productivity of the citizens is found, …
- … the odds of this gamble change, and make it more possible for a small group to seize power.
- Because if the current quality of life is terrible or the wealth not dependent on the citizens, coups are worth the risk.
- When democracies fall, these are usually the reasons.
- *somber music*
- These rules for rulers explain not only why some men are monsters and others are merciful, …
- … but everything about politics: from war to foreign aid, to political dynasties, to corruption.
- All of which, we can talk about at another time.
- But for now, you aspiring ruler, may be disgusted by the world of politics, …
- … and have decided to avoid it entirely, but you cannot, for rulers come in many forms.
- Yes, Kings, Presidents and Prime Ministers but also Deans, Dons, Mayors, Chairs, Chiefs.
- These rules apply to all and explain their actions: from the CEO of the largest global corporate conglomerate …
- … who must keep his board happy, to the chair of the smallest home owner’s association, …
- … managing votes and spending membership fees.
- You cannot escape structures of power.
- You can only turn a blind eye to understanding them, and …
- … if you ever want the change you dream about, there is a zeroth rule you cannot ignore.
- Without power you can affect nothing.
- You may not like these rules, but surely, better you on the throne than someone else.
- And who knows, maybe you’ll be different.
- *somber piano music, slowly fading*
- This video and its follow-ups are based largely on The Dictator’s Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alistair Smith, …
- … which is simply the best book on politics written.
- There is far more detail and far more examples in it than I could ever hope to cover any series of videos.
- Every citizen should read this book, and...
- ... if you want to support the channel, you can get a copy of it at Audible.com/Grey which is how I first came across the book years ago.
- If you sign up at Audible with that URL, you can get a free thirty-day trial, and give the book a listen.
- So if you want to understand human politics, if you want to understand the rules for rulers as applied to everything, …
- … go to audible.com/grey and download a copy of The Dictator’s Handbook.
- You will not regret it.
- Start your free thirty-day trial membership, listen to this book, listen to one of the 180,000 other audiobooks...
- ... and spoken audio products that Audible has.
- They're a fantastic service. They're how I get and listen to all of my audiobooks and you should too.
- Audible.com/grey Thanks to them for supporting this channel.
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