Autocracy vs pure elite rule

[Admin]

While you can occasionally come across people wanting to go back to monarchy you will have a hard time actually finding people defending pure elite rule even though it is the system with the by far best potential for good governance.

Pure elite rule = an elite group of up to 999 people having almost all of the real power.

Autocracy = a single person holding almost all of the real power.

 

[Admin]

Married queens ruled better than kings
Looking back at history researchers uncovered that queens actually did a significantky better job at expanding the borders than kings due to queens being willing to share power with the husband they married so they could be fully focused on the war effort.

Notably, queens engaged more in wars in which their polity was the aggressor, though this effect varies based on marital status. Among unmarried monarchs, queens were attacked more than kings. Among married monarchs, queens participated as attackers more than kings, and were also more likely to fight alongside allies. These results are consistent with an account in which unmarried queens were attacked as they were perceived to be weak, while married queens had greater capacity to attack, based on both alliances and a willingness to use their spouses to help them rule.

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23337/w23337.pdf

But apparently, they were. In fact, between 1480 and 1913, Europe’s queens were 27% more likely than its kings to wage war, according to a National Bureau of Economics working paper. And like Isabella, queens were also more likely to amass new territory during their reigns, found the paper’s authors, economists Oeindrila Dube and S.P. Harish.

https://qz.com/967895/throughout-history-women-rulers-were-more-likely-to-wage-war-than-men

 

[Admin]

Rome did great under elite rule
If we look at the history of the roman empire and early republic we see that they actaully did the best and gained the by far most territory before they established themselves as an autocratic empire.

Even the best emperors failed to do much to expand the borders. Trajan did have success on the battlefield but it didn't really result in any lasting progress due to the next gay emperor abandoning most of that for no good reason.

 

[Admin]

How pure elite rule can be superior to autocracy
With autocracy there is a single point of failure. Even if you get lucky and end up with a good autocrat chances are that said person is going to get assassinated anyway or die unexpectedly in some other way.

With pure elite rule you can instead create a system where there is redundancy, the whole thing will not fall apart due to one bad leader.

And now with modern technology we can spread out the highest ruling elite over the world making it very difficult for them all to get targeted at once (or even a majority of them).

With pure elite rules the highest leaders can sleep at different times to ensure that a majority will always be ready to quickly make a decision when necessary.

More people sharing the real power also means more people with a very big incentive to keep the system going. This makes it very hard to destabilize the system since that will alienate too many people and the consequences from that tend to be pretty brutal for the fools engaging in such activities.

 

[Admin]

Achieving well functioning pure elite rule is likely harder
While pure elite rule is the system with the best potential it's also very hard to actually get even close to the full potential it is offering.

I have not been able to come up with any particularly reliable strategy to achieve well functioning pure elite rule. I think it requres luck for it to take hold in any particular area but then once established it can start spreading further such as via territorial expansionism or influence campaigns.

I would estimate to probability for it emerging in the US to around 2%.

One way it could emerge is to first have a highly capable autocrat who then selects say 9 politburo member who then takes over.

Or you build a future elite ready to take over eventually (like a think tank but actually competent).

Or you have several competent autocrat merge their states into one super state /empire able to conquer the entire planet (each will get at least one seat on the politburo).

 

[Admin]

Creating a religion around the government itself
Rather than having people worship fictional gods isn't it better to have them worship over great leaders?

People are likely prone towards trusting a single person more so than worshiping a politburo even though an elite consisting of 7 to 999 people voting can be far more reliable.

But it is of course possible to get people behind trusting what say the majority of the senate votes for, it just takes more effort/education.

You can try to get people behind say individual senators but then that can also cause instability due to people trusting an individual senator more than the system itself.

 

[Admin]

Super-human decision-making via pure elite rule
By having multiple people voting you can achieve higher reliability than any individual of the group. Instead of foolishly thinking than some individual human is super-great we can achieve greatness together.

Here the crux is that this super-human decision making requires the decisions by individual senators to be sufficiently independent from each other. There are multiple strategies to achieve that such as.

0. Letting each senator select a large number of advisors to help them make good decisions.
1. Have a diverse group of senators consisting of drastically different personalities, different sexes, etc.
2. separate the senators into several smaller groups.
3. not have any senator live close to another senator and not let more than 15% of them meet within the same nuclear blast radius.
4. Have status competition within the senate for higher executive positions (to the extent the senate event grants power like that).

A second benefit with 1 is that it allows more people to feel represented in the government due to there being more people like them there (here the feeling of representation is the only thing that actually matters, not the actual reality of the situation). It's important to maintain strong support for the ruling elite for the sake of a stable society.