This desire for compliance and agreement dooms the autocracy to failure and collapse since dissent is the essence of evolutionary churn and adaptation.
The numerous flavors of autocracy (theocracy, kleptocracy, dictatorship, and so on) look incredibly effective at first blush but they all share a fatal defect. To comprehend the flaw we must begin with the dominant dynamic of all organisms, natural selection.
Things change. Those organisms which adapt rapidly and effectively make it through, those that don’t die. Things change for numerous factors and over various timespans. Drought gradually but certainly makes regions unlivable for all the however hardiest animals. A meteor strike can ruin an entire types’ prospects.
I attempt not to get too philosophical here, however bear with me since this is an essential point: choice isn’t teleological, meaning that choice isn’t pursuing an objective or end-point, it is totally contingent, entirely responsive to the environment that exists today. There is no “strategy” directing what’s picked to what we imagine is “much better;” what’s selected is whatever offers a benefit provided the selective pressures of the minute. If water is limited, anomalies that make it possible for the organism to get by on less water have selective benefits.
DNA, RNA, epigenetics and human cultures generate random mutations (i.e. a variety of experiments), and those that use a helpful action to a selective pressure are chosen and eventually spread through the gene pool or population.
A funny thing occurs when adjustment and evolutionary benefits are snuffed out: whatever can’t change expires as what was functional in the previous ends up being dysfunctional as things alter.
Autocracies see change they don’t straight control as a danger to their power, which is definitely proper: any change outside the autocrat’s control can wind up toppling the autocracy as waves of modification ripple outside and connect with different systems. One domino falls and falls many others, and soon the whole system is no longer within the control of the autocrats.
You see the problem here: adjustment is essential for survival, and effective adjustment requires a stable churn of random experiments which are left to run so that the best are picked and saved and the failures reserved.
However the churn of random experiments is anathema to autocracies, which should control whatever lest their power be interfered with. So the autocrats want control of all the experiments and of the selection process. They will choose whatever they evaluate to be helpful of their power and their routine.
But that’s not how successful adaptation works; that’s how not successful adjustment works. The very act of controlling everything disables the whole procedure of evolutionary churn and adaptation. Selecting what’s picked based on a limited and therefore fatally distorted view of what will support the autocratic status quo also disables adaptation.
Autocracies can not enable evolutionary churn to run freely enough to allow their routine to adapt to modifications. By throttling evolutionary churn– dissent, variety, experiments across the board in all fields– autocrats doom their regime to failure and collapse. The irony is their tight grip on power is their undoing.
Autocrats have a second deadly flaw: they desire contract and verification, not dissent. As soon as the autocrat chooses that this set of policies will support the routine’s control, then dissent is unwelcome.
This desire for compliance and consensus dooms the autocracy to failure and collapse because dissent is the essence of evolutionary churn and adjustment. Surround yourself with sycophants and toadies, crush dissenting views, and you have actually sealed the fate of your autocracy:
Ultimately a meteor strikes and the least adaptive organisms and regimes end. You can fool Nature for a time with strength, but autocratic force is no match for evolutionary churn and the fast adjustment just readily available to those who welcome and reward liberty, experimentation and dissent.
The more significant the modification, the higher the selective pressure. If we’re entering a period of enormous, non-linear interruption, those who have paralyzed their evolutionary churn as a risk will be the first to collapse– no matter how mighty they appear in the minute.
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