HOW TO BE A SUCCESSFUL TYRANT

[dan_sayers]

http://www.tyrantbook.com/

HOW TO BE A SUCCESSFUL TYRANT

CHAPTER ONE

THE CHALLENGE
Back in the days of the sword and the spear, becoming a successful tyrant, though somewhat risky, was not particularly complicated. If you had enough start-up capital to hire a few thugs to terrorize and rob the local townsfolk, you could increase your wealth, hire more thugs, expand your victim base, and so on.

As long as the proportion of your thugs to your victims was high enough, usually the only real threat to your regime would be a competing tyrant. And if the other tyrant was bigger than you, he could usually be appeased with a simple payoff, which would not only persuade him not to have you executed, but might even result in his "protecting" you from other tyrants.

Ah, the good old days. Today, however, in much of the world such simple thuggery is no longer effective. Mere brute force is not enough to acquire and maintain a successful oppressive regime. These days, because one disgruntled peasant with a hunting rifle can rather abruptly end your megalomaniacal plans, "old school" tyranny is ineffective, and new methods are needed.

THE TWO GOALS
There are two primary goals of any tyrant. The superficial goal is to have other people's property completely at your disposal. This goal deals with material wealth: other people produce it, and you take it from them and do what you want with it. Such simple material greed is the motivation of purse-snatchers, car-jackers, and bank robbers, but by itself it is not what motivates true tyrants.

The deeper goal of the tyrant is to have control, not just over property, but over the very thoughts and desires of the peasantry; in short, to replace their free will with your will. (The desire for this is sometimes called the "love of dominion.") In short, your goal is to eradicate the self-determination and self-ownership of every other individual on the planet. Their souls are to be replaced by your agenda.

The peasants must be trained to be slaves, physically and psychologically, but this cannot be accomplished by brute force alone.

Though violence can often control the actions of people, it cannot control their thoughts. Again, if your subjects don't want to be bossed around, there will be constant conflicts to deal with. But if you are successful in training them to want to obey you, such problems will not occur. You must break their will, drain their humanity, and consume their souls, leaving them docile and subservient, unable or unwilling to think for themselves. They will be capable only of obedience; they will exist for a single purpose: to serve your will, and your will alone.

"Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women. When it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it." [Justice Learned Hand]

Think of the above quote, not as a warning, but as a suggestion. If you remove from your intended victims their natural yearning for freedom — if you can train them to not want to be free, they will soon be begging you to enslave them (and you will gladly oblige them).

The good news is that such control can be achieved using words alone. Propaganda is the single greatest controlling force in the world; as a tool for persuasion, it is far more powerful than any weapon of violence could ever be.

"The broad masses of a population are more amenable to the appeal of rhetoric than to any other force." [Adolf Hitler]

"Print is the sharpest and the strongest weapon of our party." [Joseph Stalin]

In fact, in this day and age, the power of propaganda is absolutely essential to establishing a tyrannical regime. Brute force cannot control the informed, but is hardly even needed to control the deceived.

"Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything — you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him." [Robert Heinlein]

Control via deception and manipulation is a precise art, requiring a solid understanding of human psychology. Most people can be played like puppets: pull the right strings and they will do what you want. (Pull the wrong string, however, and the peasants might chop your head off.) The more "strings" you have attached to the thoughts and decisions of your peasants, the deeper and more profound your control will be. Of course, the degree to which you can control the peasants will always be inversely proportional to the degree to which they can think for themselves.

PERCEPTION IS EVERYTHING
The "old school" tyrants, who ruled by simple brute force, are confounded today by two things: firearms and ideas. Firearms enable even weak peasants to kill you (or at least to kill your thugs).

But it is the ideas which cause people to do such things which are the real problem for would-be tyrants.
"Ideas are far more powerful than guns. We don't allow our enemies to have guns; why should we allow them to have ideas?" [Joseph Stalin]

Unless your victims have the motivation to resist you, firearms by themselves are no threat. But if they do have the motivation and means to resist, no amount of brute force can save you. "No state can control those who have the machinery and the will to resist." [L. Neil Smith]

Therein lies the key to being a successful tyrant in modern times: removing from the peasants the desire to resist.

Consider two different "flavors" of crook: an armed car-jacker and a scam artist. A car-jacker just walks up to a car, points a gun at the driver, and tells him to get out of the car. Provided the victim of the theft does not have both the motivation and the ability to resist by force, the car-jacker will be successful. But it's anyone's guess which intended victim will surrender, and which will put a bullet in the car-jacker's brain. In this example, the driver obviously does not want the car-jacker to have his car, so one way or another the dispute will be settled by force.

But suppose you as the thief could make the driver want to give you his car. That may seem absurd, but consider this scenario: "Hey buddy, this is an emergency! My wife is right around the corner, and she just went into labor. I gotta get her to the hospital right away! I see you only have a two-seater. Please, buddy, I need help! Can I borrow your car? I swear I'll bring it back as soon as I drop her off! It's an emergency! She has heart troubles, and..."

Not only would many drivers voluntarily surrender their car in response to such an appeal, but they would feel good about it. (A few days later, when he still has no car, the owner wouldn't feel so good any more, but then it's too late for him to resist.) By persuasion and deception, the scam artist avoids the threat that the simple thug is always under. Expand that to a far more grand scale, and you have the key to being a successful tyrant: You must make your victims want you to rule them.

Trouble is, as a general rule most people don't want you bossing them around. In short, to control their wealth and their actions, you must first control their minds. If you can dictate what they think, what they want, and what they believe, then you will have no need for thuggery at all. If you can convince them to voluntarily give up their free will to you — if you can teach them to want to be slaves, you will be the ultimate tyrant. You will have taken their very humanity, and reduced them to mere sources of power for you to use as you see fit. (Of course, you will also be completely evil, but don't let that stop you.)

[grasshopper]

  Do NOT take this wrong but the advent of the long bow helped win our rites from these same tyrants, thus the raised middle finger.
  When in the days of old when the thugs came to the outskirts of the town, the people would grab their shields and spears to protect their real defensive weapons, the Longbow men!
   If you saw a potential thug, you'd give em the middle finger so show that you were a bow man to make the thugs think twice about raiding the village.  They could hack the shield wall but a arrow from 300 yards is hard to stop at high speed.
   In our day and age, the saying that mostly resembles the middle finger is the phrase, "Voting from the rooftops".
   I read a simmlar story, The price of free corn.
  I read this very thing from George Washington University, the Communitarian plans for the defeat of America.

[alphaniner]

I read a simmlar story, The price of free corn.

That was a good read, thanks for pointing it out!

[Dan]

Video of an author's speech I just stumbled upon today covering just this subject:

[youtube=425,350]RjALf12PAWc[/youtube]

Bring a blanket and keep the lights on.

I just posted that she should be considered for the Liberty Forum.  She would /feel/ out of place, but would be right at home giving this very speech there.

[KBCraig]

Video of an author's speech I just stumbled upon today covering just this subject:

"We're sorry, this video is no longer available."

Copyright cops strike again!

[Dan]

Quick Quick!  Here it is.
[youtube=425,350]RjALf12PAWc[/youtube]

[EthanAllen]

Naomi Klein is a major Canadian leftist...rails against globalization.

http://books.google.com/books?id=W5QrJJLrS0MC&pg=PP1&dq=inauthor:Naomi+inauthor:Klein&ei=CBYaR6KYMoP06wKR9tCTBQ&sig=9iePS27wBP0s04BgPiKEkC8G388#PPR8,M1

[alphaniner]

I just posted that she should be considered for the Liberty Forum.  She would /feel/ out of place, but would be right at home giving this very speech there.

I'm inclined to disagree.  She explicitly focuses all of her ire towards the right, and all of her 'love' towards the left.  Also, I am inherently suspicious of anyone who claims to be so familiar with the work of the Founders, but still throws around the word democracy without so much as a disclaimer.  And what about the part when she mentioned the 2nd Amendment?  At first I was hopeful, but then she went off on a tangent about para-military organizations and how standing armies are supposed to be held accountable to the people.  It seemed to me like an obfuscated well-regulated militia tirade.

I'm not saying there's nothing to what she has to say, just that I really don't think the Liberty Forum would be right for her or vice-versa. 

[error]

Naomi Klein is a major Canadian leftist...rails against globalization.

(Bah, how'd you get off ignore?)

You know that is someone else entirely who has nothing to do with the topic at hand, right?

[Dan]

I just posted that she should be considered for the Liberty Forum.  She would /feel/ out of place, but would be right at home giving this very speech there.

I'm inclined to disagree.  She explicitly focuses all of her ire towards the right, and all of her 'love' towards the left.  Also, I am inherently suspicious of anyone who claims to be so familiar with the work of the Founders, but still throws around the word democracy without so much as a disclaimer.  And what about the part when she mentioned the 2nd Amendment?  At first I was hopeful, but then she went off on a tangent about para-military organizations and how standing armies are supposed to be held accountable to the people.  It seemed to me like an obfuscated well-regulated militia tirade.

I'm not saying there's nothing to what she has to say, just that I really don't think the Liberty Forum would be right for her or vice-versa. 

I think the added friction would make her even better at the Liberty Forum.  I noticed a lot of the inside jabbing, and her earlier works look just as barbed.  That's fine with me.  What's important is she is passionately pointing out the encroaching police state, the methodical de-engineering of civil liberties, and doesn't DRONE on and on about how it's all the other teams fault.

Besides, have you ever been in a room full of freestaters when the commentator makes a statist play?  They usually get reprimanded from four or five people in the room simultaneously. 

I've learned a lot about tolerance, we can extend it even to those that have her agenda.  It'll make for great conversation.

[Dan]

(Bah, how'd you get off ignore?)

You remade your account, remember?  Call it temporal dissonance of ephemeral entity instanciation.

[alphaniner]

I think the added friction would make her even better at the Liberty Forum.  I noticed a lot of the inside jabbing, and her earlier works look just as barbed.  That's fine with me.  What's important is she is passionately pointing out the encroaching police state, the methodical de-engineering of civil liberties, and doesn't DRONE on and on about how it's all the other teams fault.

Besides, have you ever been in a room full of freestaters when the commentator makes a statist play?  They usually get reprimanded from four or five people in the room simultaneously.

I've never attended a Liberty Forum, so perhaps it was out of place for me to suggest that she wouldn't belong there.  What I should have said is that having watched her speech, I got the impression that she wouldn't be receptive to the 'libertarian' perspective on the issues.  I may well be mistaken on this, though, and I certainly have no objections to her attending if she wishes to.

I've learned a lot about tolerance, we can extend it even to those that have her agenda.  It'll make for great conversation.

No argument here.

[grasshopper]

Clever little commie, What she is doing is reading the play book, a "how to" , sounding like crittisism, I love the part about Antonio Gramshi without mentioning him.  I had to turn it off.
   I'll watch this later when I have more patience.
   Commie:  Kids, what ever you do, do not form NGOs like moveon.org or take over the education system and replace curriculum with the "party line".  Never ever!!!  ever ever ever!!!!
  Error, this is exactly on subject.  If you hear her, you can hear the commies marching!!!

[EthanAllen]

I love the part about Antonio Gramshi without mentioning him.

That's G-R-A-M-S-C-I

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Gramsci

[alphaniner]

I love the part about Antonio Gramshi without mentioning him.

That's G-R-A-M-S-C-I

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Gramsci

EA,

I've probably got more respect for you than most people on this board, but I gotta say that was pretty damn rude, and entirely unnecessary.
-1 for being an arse... but +1 for the linky, 'cause I had no idea who Antonio Gramsci was.