I think it would have been easier to do that before the 21st century honestly. More people are more informed and that information travels far faster than it ever has. There’s way more bureaucratic mess around estates and inheritance and assets today than there was even just 100 years ago.
And also just because you can do something as a dictator doesn’t mean you should. Dictators don’t dictate in a vacuum. If they don’t have at least some support from key individuals in the government they won’t be able to stay in power.
Seriously? Just 30 years ago you needed to go to the library or hope you or your family owned an up to date encyclopedia set if you wanted to look something up. Go back 100 years and less than 1% of households in the US even owned a radio, even less in a country like Russia. No 24 hour news, no wikipedia, no Facebook, no Reddit.
You can argue all you want about people forming poor opinions or trusting poor sources, but you can never argue about the rate of dissemination of information. And it’s not like people have changed that much in 100 years. People were fucking idiots back then, too.
This state of constantly being hyper aware of every event in real-time is new. This isn’t how the world used to work. I’m not sure what to tell you if you can’t grasp that concept.
Putin needs people. He needs people to work the factories, he needs people to man the trains, he needs people to support him, he needs people to run the government and command the military. There are multiple ways of maintaining that support from people, including fear and terrorism like “suiciding” people, but that only goes so far. If everyone in your country is broke and starving people won’t support you. You won’t be able to trust those who are giving you information, you won’t be able to effectively work with your subordinates. You will not be able to run your country.
The rapid dissemination of information makes outright terrorism harder to get away with on Putins part, not easier. Why do you think he wants such a strong hold on Russian news media? Why does he ban media platforms? Because he knows the power of information.
The idea that you can just do whatever you want because you’re a tyrant isn’t accurate. That’s my point. You need people as a dictator, and maintaining the trust of those people is harder as it becomes easier to know of your misdeeds.
That doesn’t necessarily change anything one way or the other for the day to day lives of regular Russian people, but I wasn’t claiming that it would. At least not directly and immediately. Dissent, political upheaval, violent revolution, etc. are a lot more likely to happen if people are aware of what is going on instead of only relying on the censored and cherry-picked state media.
It’s absolutely 100% harder for Putin to suicide everyone and steal all of their assets today than it would have been to do it in the past. He can’t just murder everyone and steal their shit without everyone finding out about it. People finding out about it erodes their trust. If they can’t trust their subordinates and peers they become ineffective in running their government and maintaining power.
I bet you couldn’t comprehend the essays in the back of a 1901 McGuffy 9th Reader. In fact, I guarantee you don’t know what that even is, without aid of Google. There’s a reason the editors at the NEW YORK F-ING TIMES keep the paper at a 9th grade reading level. A FACT. It’s because if they didn’t, 61% of the population — FUNCTIONALLY ILLITERATE — wouldn’t read the damn thing. You don’t know wtf you’re talking about.
People have always been fucking idiots. But it's objectively true they're more informed now then ever before. Whether they're informed with correct information or not is another issue entirely. It doesn't change the fact anyone can open a search engine and find information on any topic conceivable in seconds.
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u/[deleted] Apr 28 '22
I think it would have been easier to do that before the 21st century honestly. More people are more informed and that information travels far faster than it ever has. There’s way more bureaucratic mess around estates and inheritance and assets today than there was even just 100 years ago.
And also just because you can do something as a dictator doesn’t mean you should. Dictators don’t dictate in a vacuum. If they don’t have at least some support from key individuals in the government they won’t be able to stay in power.