Orwell and fictional evidence for dictatorship stability

Isn't that line about a foot stomping on a human face forever a quote from O'Brian? If so, it's the kind of thing he'd like to believe, but it wouldn't be the sort of thing that could be known, and is less likely to be accurate considering that atmosphere of lies that Oceania had.

On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if Orwell meant it to be taken straight.

Second thought: O'Brian might not have believed it himself (what does belief mean to an Inner Party member?), he just might have been saying it to get Winston to despair.

One of the other implausibilities of the book is that people who get hurt in dictatorships are generally just ground up by the system, they aren't targeted by a highly intellectual stalker.

The most stable forms of government are democracies and monarchies; nothing else endures that long.

What's the difference between a monarchy and a dictatorship? A monarchy has rules of succession but most monarchies foundered through contested successions. A dictator can also groom a successor (like Kim Jong-Un). And many monarchs who didn't inherit their power could be called dictators.

Robespierre was deposed from within his own government - and so the Terror, for all its bloodshed, didn't even last a full year. The worse excesses of Stalinism ended with Stalin. Gorbachev voluntarily opened up his regime (to a certain extent). Mao would excoriate the China of today.

All of these are examples of very stable dictatorships. As you point out, none of them were close to revolution (Gorbachev's USSR had coup attempts, but not popular revolutions). In each case, when the successors attained power, they repudiated the previous dictator's harsh policies and instituted reforms - something which is easiest to do during a generational change of power. This didn't happen because the dictatorships weren't stable.

I'm confused by this post but I'm not sure if that is because of vocabulary or actually disagreement (and whether that disagreement is about Orwell or the world).

First, I don't agree that "dictatorships are stable forms of government" has seeped into our consciousness. I mean, maybe it is the case for people who just read the book. But in the field of international relations it is practically a truism that dictatorships are unstable. Much of American foreign policy thought consists of worrying about what will happen when this or that dictators dies, loses control over his military or faces popular revolt. And there are tons of explanations for why democracies are so stable, see "Democratic Peace Theory".

Second, Orwell's Oceania wasn't a dictatorship. There was a central figure-- "Big Brother"-- but it turned out Big Brother was long gone, if he had ever existed at all. Totalitarian, authoritarian and oligarchical--yes, but it isn't clear it is a dictatorship. This is relevant because Orwell's prediction wasn't actually about the number of people with power: it was about power as a force which could control and produce all human activity. It was a warning about totalitarianism more than anything else.

Lots of dictatorships aren't especially totalitarian. They might seek to have total control over their country, but don't come anywhere close to achieving it. Such regimes are unstable and Orwell wouldn't say otherwise. What Orwell foresaw were increases in the ability of rulers to have complete power over their people and an interest in gaining that power.

Also, presumably he was not actually predicting their inevitability but warning of the possibility of an oligarchical totalitarian government that could rule eternally. And it seems odd to take an outside view about a detailed inside view argument. Like, Orwell showed how Oceania would be stable in perpetuity not how every dictatorship would.

In general, it seems like you are taking one famous quote and giving in an astonishing degree of influence over political discourse while not actually considering a) how people really think about government or b) the context in which the quote was produced.

But that doesn't mean it's accurate as a source of predictions or counterfactuals. Orwell's belief that "British democracy as it existed before 1939 would not survive the war" was wrong.

London has rougly as many cameras that watch it's population as Orwell predicts in his book. Sure the camera's that people have in their homes aren't yet directly connected to the surveillance apparatus but the amount of camera's outside the home is massive.

Secret gap orders allow powerful people to delete newspaper articles from the internet archives of important UK papers and prevent new articles to get published.

You have laws force people to speak in front of court against their own interest by giving the government their passwords.

a lot of implicit assumptions have seeped into our consciousness. The most important one (shared with many other dystopian novels) is that dictatorships are stable forms of government.

we should refrain from assuming that dictatorships, whether party or individual, are somehow the default state, and conduct a much more evidence-based analysis of the matter.

My comment is unrelated to Orwell, but it is related to the stability of real-world political regimes.

I recently read The Dictator’s Handbook, an excellent book which essentially is a popular account of the selectorate theory. Let me attempt a TL;DR, or rather a list of key points relevant to the current discussion, from memory:

1. Nobody rules alone. Stalins, Genghis Khans and Clintons need supporters to keep them in power.

2. The key imperative of a ruler is his political survival, that is, staying in power.

3. The ruler stays in power by rewarding his essential supporters (referred to as ‘essentials’), that is, people whose support translates into staying in power.

4. Regimes where the coalition of essentials is small are referred to as autocracies. Regimes with large coalitions of essentials are referred to as democracies. The authors prefer to use these two terms instead of the usual definitions such as monarchy, dictature, theocracy, kleptocracy etc.

5. In an autocracy, where the number of essentials is small, it’s cheaper for the ruler to purchase their support with private rewards (money, security, palaces, yachts, de-facto immunity from the law etc.)

6. In a democracy, where the number of essentials is large, it’s cheaper for the ruler to purchase their support via public goods (usually in the form of good governance and policies, such as healthcare, education, etc.)

7. Statistically, the political survival of a ruler (defined via the probability of being ousted in the next two-year period) in an autocracy is significantly higher than in a democracy. That is, an autocracy is statistically more stable than a democracy.

8. Purchasing a foreign policy concession (demanded as a public-good reward by the coalition of essentials of the democratic ruler) from an autocracy is cheaper than purchasing it from a democracy. This is an external factor that pushes regimes towards autocracies and away from democracies.

9. Successful revolutions in autocracies occur when the ruler cannot reliably provide his essentials with private rewards, or won’t be able to do so in the near future. When the essentials understand that their flow of private rewards may cease soon, they begin to shop around for other options and may "fail" to protect the ruler from a promising challenger or a revolution.

10. The most stable autocracies are those where the ruler doesn’t need people as a source of resources for rewarding his coalition of essentials. For example, when a ruler has oil he doesn’t need to extract taxes from the populace, which means he isn’t compelled to provide public goods and policies that increase tax income, which in turn means that he is free to suppress his people in order to minimize the chances of a successful revolution.

So, to answer the question posed in the original post, autocracies (including dictatorships) are indeed more stable than democracies, at least according to the selectorate theory.

As for the book itself, I found it excellent. Aside from being a fascinating, eye-opening read in general, its section on modern Russia is more spot-on than anything I read in our political press back when I still consumed political news -- I correctly predicted its content before reading it!

Perhaps something which may be useful here is to look at a couple dictatorships that have been stable, and why:

• North Korea survives on propaganda, isolation, and by keeping the population so poor and scattered that revolution is nearly impossible. The controllers have access to substantial power compared to the population as a whole, and the population is prevented from using their political superpower because they're too scattered and diffuse.

• Saudi Arabia survives by having so much power and money funneled to the ruling class that the ruling class is able to keep the population in check. The population's superpower is available, but the ruling class has sufficient resources and control to keep the population from wanting to use it.

The common theme in both of these cases is merely that the ruling class is able to maintain a sufficient power gap over the population, which is effectively the same thing that happened in 1984. Some technologies make this easier and some make it harder. Nothing guarantees democratic organization, and advancement of technology may in fact lead to conditions that strongly prefer dictatorships in the future.

If nothing else, look at the "infinite paperclip maximizer" crowd and Eliezer's fears that a single AI would take over the entire universe: that's one of the most strict, unforgiving and inescapable dictatorships you could possibly ask for. It's such an inescapable dictatorship that Eliezer has set up an entire research institution dedicated to securing us favorable rules should one be set up.

Ultimately I think it's more interesting to discuss the conditions and requirements for stable dictatorship than whether or not dictatorships are more stable than democracies.

Orwell did write that Oceana wasn't robust to genuine external threats, but his fictional world lacked them. Also, I suspect that a sufficiently bad natural disaster could also disrupt things enough to shut down the system and force people to start over.

One important step is to identify the relevant factors that need to be considered to determine what kind of governments are stable. Educational level, technology, wealth, cultural diversity and antagonism, etc. A recent paper in Science is an interesting example: "Ethnicity and Conflict: Theory and Facts", Joan Esteban, Laura Mayoral, and Debraj Ray, Science 18 May 2012: 858-865. [DOI:10.1126/science.1222240]. It took on the question of how ethnic diversity affects stability. They found 1 ethnic group is very stable, 2 less stable, 3 the least-stable, and then increasing stability from there on. But this depended on whether the rewards of ruling were "public" or "private". "Public" rewards are where the central government gets all the tax money and decides how to spend it. The more money you spend at the federal level vs. the state level, the more likely you are to have ethnic conflict.

Re. democracy, that does not exist. There is no government in the world where the citizens choose legislation, render legal verdicts, or do anything by popular vote other than elect people to do those things for them.

One aspect of government is information theoretic. (A government is very like an AI architecture. The earliest and simplest ones used pure top-down planning and information flow; later we learned how to design more distributed, bottom-up AI architectures and governments.) How much of the information present in the population is available for governing? Policy should maximize information flow towards decisions. This would involve identifying, for any issue, which people provide positive information, ensuring that they're motivated to provide truthful information, and summing up their information in an optimal way. "One person, one vote" is far from optimal, and possibly worse than random.

Your caveats seem to make the rest of the post a bit pointless, although it is very interesting! You say that dictatorships have not been stable up till now, i.e. in conditions we are used to. But the central xrisk concern about dictatorships is their stability in new conditions i.e. world government or advanced surveillance. The stability of dictatorships in the past or at present doesn't seem to have much bearing on their stability in the future.

Or rather, it seems to have bearing in the more limited sense that we can examine particular causes of past instability and consider dictatorship-stability without them. So for example isolation seems key. If the USSR was the sole state in the world, it would probably be around today. A major reason for its end was elite exposure to outside ideas, mass exposure to differences in living standards and the cost of competition with the West. If an isolated totalitarian state is able to keep a strong enough grip on its education, media and power structure to prevent people with alternative ideas from gaining power or influence, it seems like it could last a long time.

This seems to be the main problem with a singleton. I sometimes imagine the future as threading the needle between increased control and global coordination (to prevent nano- and bio-risks) and the possibility of dictatorship.

I think you'd do well to distinguish between dictatorship and totalitarianism.

Ideological totalitarianism seems very stable to me in ways that a corrupt and venal dictatorship is not. Add in a panopticon that is already technically feasible, and there's little reason I see it can't last and last and last, particularly if the group in power sees benefit in the system.

I am glad to see you write that forever = forever. The more I learned about the implications of absolute terms the less I came to use them.

There is no evidence that anything like the world he envisaged could (or will) happen.

The future won't be like the past

Which is it? The past limits the future or the past does not limit the future?

Nitpick: the British expansion of the franchise seems out of place in your list. Britain was hardly a dictatorship to begin with, so doesn't constitute evidence that dictatorships change, though it is evidence that non-democracies can become democracies without violence.

It was a product of its time. For a long time the shift had been towards larger states, bigger weapons of war technology had allowed more central authority.

Since then the shift has gone the other way. One person can carry a weapon which can blow the largest warship out of the water and significant weapons have become smaller and more accessible. Computing and crypto has given everyone capable the tools to speak privately if they really want it.

Some tech makes it easier for a small number of people to control a lot of people, some tech makes it harder.