Until it’s not.
I remember when I was proudly saying: “Nah, man, I’m not into politics. It’s all lies and deception.” I was proud that I’m avoiding the trickery by not involving myself in it. Not reading news, not paying attention to my rights, not getting into discussions because, Duh, I’m better than this. Let those bastards do their things, and I’ll do mine.
Then I immigrated. I slowly realized that one reason I was avoiding politics was the fear. I was living with a constant fear of getting myself into trouble if I figure out what is actually happening in my country. I’m out for more than four years now, and now I have access to propaganda from many sides and not just Iran’s. I read things, I watch things, I learn things, lot’s of AHA moments, but all this time, I was asking the same question whenever I was reading anything about some dictator-ruled country: Why the hell are you doing this?
Like, yesterday, Maduro announced that the Russian vaccine has %100 efficacy. not %80 not %90 not even %99.9 but 100 fucking percent. This sounds so stupid that as a normal person, not even a politician, I would rethink before saying such trash to avoid losing whatever reputation I have. But Maduro, leader of a country, did. Why the hell are you doing this?
Iranian supreme leader banned western vaccines in the middle of a pandemic, saying, “I don’t trust them.” Or about a year ago, IRGC, which is kinda like an army dedicated to protecting the “Islamic revolution,” proudly revealed a bizarre disk shape metal thing saying, “ it can be used to detect moments of the coronavirus within a 100 m (330 ft) radius based on electromagnetic radiation.” Why the hell are you doing this?
Equilibrium, equilibrium everywhere.
I think you got the idea, North Korea, Venezuela, Iran, Syria, sometimes even the cradle of democracy, the mighty USA under the Trump administration did things that are really hard to understand why.
I guess I now have some answers for some of those things, at least. A couple of months ago, instead of writing my own paper, I was procrastinating by looking for Game Theoretical models of competing political systems. For example, I wanted to know between dictatorship and democracy, which one is more stable and, therefore, more likely to dominate the world in the long run. I mean, why not. I didn’t find anything probably because my question was really dumb, but I ended up with an interesting book that did this “equilibrium analysis” within the dictatorship system.
Equilibrium in a toy example:
Let me first give a quick and oversimplified example to show what I mean by equilibrium. Skip to the next part if you already know about the prisoner’s dilemma. Imagine two bandits (yeah, whatever, let’s say you and your pal) recently arrested. You are locked in separate interrogation rooms, and here’s the deal:
If you cooperate with your pal and nobody confesses anything, you both serve one year, but if you both confess, you’ll serve a decade in jail. If one confesses and the other doesn’t, then the one who confessed will go free and the one who didn’t rot in jail (just look at the “pay-off matrix below!) So the best scenario for each of you individually is to confess and hope the other is shut, but hey, you know the other one is thinking about the same thing, so you know this is a risky thing to do because probably both of you will end up serving 10 years in prison.
If this is a one-time event, then confessing is the option for you because it’s either going to jail for a decade (your pall confessed too) or just a year (he didn’t). Keeping your mouth shut tho means you have a %50 chance of serving the lifetime. Now let’s assume this is a game that you can play many times. With this twist, everything changes. Now you settling on not confessing makes more sense, and this is a point of equilibrium. A point that both players end up there if they want to maximize their reward or, here, minimize punishment. A point that given the rules, nobody can get better options. (watch this for a much more elegant way to explain this game!)
Equilibria in nature:
It’s pretty neat, honestly, and it’s everywhere. For example, Evolutionary Game Theory does a good job figuring out Evolutionary Stable Strategies (ESS) that animals follow. Like here in the figure below. Imagine you have some places in the park that people feed geese with bread crumbs. Point (A) is full of people, so there’s a lot of bread crumbs and let’s say as a goose, you will have something %80 of the time. There’s a point (B) too that is less crowded, so by hanging there you’ll end up with %20 of the time eating. Intuitively, the best thing to do is to stay in the point (A) and have all the crumbs.
But you’re not the only goose, and others also try to eat as much as possible. Consequently, point (A) will end up so crowded with geese that you’re chance of getting anything is now more in the point (B). This is what actually happens in nature (look for Ideal Free Distributions, Probability Matching, ESS,…). Animals distribute themselves according to not only the absolute probability of what they can get but also what others do. Again, individually the good option is something while the point of equilibrium considering other variables is something else. That’s where you have to settle if you’re optimizing things.
Dictators are no different.
Alright, so far it was introductions to this and that. Now we’re talking about the real gem. The quest for equilibria in things seems to be really famous among economists and one of them, called Ronald Wintrobe used it to figure out how dictators behave. The results are pretty impressive, you see many dictators with different ideologies end up behaving the same way, and now you kinda know why. In one sentence, they seem to have no other choices. It’s a goddamn equilibrium like a blackhole dragging them in. They’re maximizing things, and this means they can’t do better by doing anything else, just like geese distributing themselves in the park even though it looks counter-intuitive to HONK in the empty part.
The Dictator’s Dilemma:
Wintrobe starts with a universal problem that he calls The Dictator’s Dilemma (don’t confuse it with the Dictator’s game). The problem is fundamentally about information. As a dictator, you don’t really know how much people really want you. The reason is you’re a fucking dictator so everyone is afraid to show their true feelings about you. In a proper democracy, it’s clear, people rally, criticize and eventually vote you out if they really don’t want you. But as a dictator, they can’t move you, they can’t talk, they can’t express themselves, so there’s no information coming from them showing how loyal they actually are.
In many cases, dictators even receive false information. For example, a couple of clerics had a meeting with Iran’s supreme leader and they were told by the organizers to “talk such that it pleases the supreme leader”. Basically, what a dictator knows about the people is pretty distorted and incomplete and this usually ends up with the dictator getting more and more paranoid. This is a paradox in a way that the more power the dictator craves, the less they learn about people, and well, assuming everyone wants to kill them is an obvious point to reach because the way they can expand their power is mainly through terror. Interestingly, one equilibrium point is to have enough terror. Otherwise, loyalty starts to decrease as they increase the suppression.
Basically, this type of spreading terror by over punishing people works as a strong signal to them: the price of trying to ditch the dictator outweighs the potential benefits because firstly it’s immediate and certain, and secondly, it’s your life. This is what happened during the last uprising in Iran (well, basically all of them but yeah) back in 2019, some reports estimate up to 1500 people got killed during a week or two. There were orders to shoot directly towards the head and body instead of the legs. The point is, the response wasn’t proportional and for a reason. Even when things got calmer they continued executing people so again, signaling the immediate, certain, terribly high cost of not wanting the dictator.
Obviously, this spreads the fear. Obviously, it became even harder than before to know who’s actually loyal to the regime, and Khamenei (the supreme leader) found this out by losing two of his best and closest friends in direct terror attacks one in Iraq (Qassem Suleimani by the US drones) and the other in Iran (Fakhrizadeh by nobody knows who yet). Set aside other events like the quite large list of explosions in protected facilities, the assassination of an Al-Qaida high-rank member in the middle of Tehran, it’s weird to assume in a country with such high surveillance, random folks can just go around, do shit like this and run away without a trace. There are disloyal elites, which are difficult to find as a consequence of the high cost of showing who you really want (high repression). Speaking of elites, let’s see how they’re doing and what dictators can do about it.
Overpaying some, suppressing the rest:
Another thing dictators do to ensure loyalty is to buy it and this is where elites come into the mess. Dictators don’t know who’s loyal and who’s not so they start overpaying their supporters to guarantee their loyalty. Overpayment here means what they do doesn’t worth what they’re getting paid for. This overpayment is the key to keep them around because they can’t sell better somewhere else. Remember IRGC’s Corona detector? For sure it wasn’t for free and it wasn’t the only weird thing we know from those fellers.
Many things started to make sense for me just by realizing this strategy. Let me give you another example, corruption in Iran is pretty bad and usually, it ends with someone from these elites devouring resources. Another way Iran is buying support is by paying militia in the Middle East claiming it’s all defensive while, for example, giving Hamas suitcases filled with cash. I can go through many individual examples of who is getting overpaid here both in and out of Iran and how, but I think you got the point so let’s move on.
Nobody’s safe:
Well, only if it was that easy. Elite is overpaid and supportive but for how long? Eventually and as we saw with Iran’s status quo, they are even more problematic than ordinary people. Interestingly, one of the main ways dictators fall is by elites so smarter dictators should keep them not only happy but just-the-right-amount-scared. Scared of losing it all in an instant, no matter how close you are.
Seems like there are two ways to do this, one is by provoking a constant agitation using competitions. For example, Iran has an army, an actual army that is underpaid and less equipped, but it has another army too, overpaid and well equipped. You guessed it, the revolutionary guard IRGC. It even has a more weird militia-style army called Basij besides these two that more compete with the police force.
Then we have a ministry of intelligence, then we have another similar one for the revolutionary guard, besides these somehow we seem to have 14 more intelligence agencies in Iran! We literally have a government and something else in parallel competing with the government and you can see sometimes shit hits the fan and the whole regime gets into internal frictions before the supreme leader heroically appears and settles things down. There’s a lot of parallelism (redundancy, actually) in every part of the system with the competition getting heavier when it comes to military power.
Nobody, is, safe:
Another more targetted way is something that happens more in North Korea, people really close to their supreme leader suddenly get executed. Seems like Stalin took this to the extreme in the “great purge” when he (besides ethnic cleansing and stuff) purged the communist party, the elites, and autocrats. But Iran, for example, didn’t do it for a long time. They actually did some sort of purge after the Islamic revolution to clean the universities but that was it. The same people are sitting on their asses for decades now and they are far deep into the corruption.
Remember that this is the healthy dose of fear we’re talking about not the one that fuels the dictator's dilemma. That already pushes the equilibrium towards less loyalty. Here the dictator wants to overpay so he can buy loyalty and spooks them a bit so he can keep loyalty. The trade-off is large-scale corruption and losing the normal people even more. It’s a different thing than suppressing the shit out of everyone in a way that even elites become black boxes.
And the many flavors of the same shit
Wintrobe does something else that I found pretty interesting. He distinguishes dictators into four main groups based on what they want to maximize mostly. He assumes, in any case, dictators maximize power and wealth so depending on how much they’re focusing on what, they behave fundamentally differently.
For example, there are dictators that use “relatively less” suppression and just want to use resources that make them Tinpot dictators. Interestingly, he mentions Iran’s Shah as an example who pissed the poor off by throwing the most luxurious party in the world. I’m not sure but I think Maduro and Lukashenko are Tinpots too.
Then you have Tyrants that are pretty violent and focus more on the power part, I say Iran is here currently so we overthrew a Tinpot and got a Tyrant instead.
Then we have someone who has “relatively the least” amount of violence and distributes the wealth kinda nicely. They are even loved by the people so Wintrobe called them “Timocrats” from Plato’s Republic, referring to a benevolent dictator that cares for the people. I really have no idea who can be a current Timocrat, Wintrobe mentions Fidel Castro, but I wanna say Iran’s previous Shah (Reza Shah) might be one too. I mean, during the last few uprisings and riots people were chanting his name as a hero so he somehow is loved I guess! If this is true then we’re doing great, from a Timocrat to a Tinpot and now a Tyrant. What next? Of course a Totalitarian dictator, someone who wants all the power and wealth under his own control. And yes you probably are thinking about the same thing now, is Iran going there? I say yes (Wintrobe already counts Iran as a Totalitarian regime though it’s over for him).
Remember the inner fierce competition? It’s almost settled by the “reformists” getting wiped out from the parliament and probably everywhere else soon since they lost the people and the supreme leader both. This means Iran is about to become a one-party country that is one of the main conditions of Totalitarianism according to the French analyst Raymond Aron in his book Democracy and Totalitarianism. This is just great, I guess Iran is the only country that went deep into this shit in one century while other countries are at least trying to go the other way.
Conclusions
This piece was pretty focused on Iran because I’m more into its inner dynamics and I could see all these examples while reading the book. I also added my own thoughts, of course, this isn’t a book review. But you need to remember that I’m not an expert in political science or economics or social sciences so what this post tries to do is to share the frustration and maybe help others to sanity check their countries. Look, I started by asking a naive question of which political system is more stable and ended with a horrifying possibility that, set aside democracy, dictatorship itself can get worse easily. In about a hundred years one country spiraled from the least shitty dictatorship (still shitty tho) to the worst one. So, if things clicked for you as a non-Iranian then maybe you gotta do something about it, I honestly have no idea what but maybe informing others is the first step. Don’t be the old me.
Democracy → dictatorship:
Wintrobe talks about how democracies can fall into dictatorship too, mainly by their “inaction” that starts polarizing people and ends up radicalizing them. In a democracy, it’s harder to do things since a consensus is needed to be reached first that might end up in this swamp of inaction. It was so weird reading this book exactly when Trump’s followers attacked the Capitol. I see how people are radicalized (even I myself) by the frustration of not getting what they were promised.
The cherry on top:
A note to keep in mind is that these models are not oracles predicting and explaining things with no error. In fact, you just need to change the pay-off matrix to change the equilibrium. Add another variable, another type of interaction, another whatever and the whole result might end up differently. Just admire the beauty of the approach and how this book explained things but know its limits. It had a lot more to offer that I can’t cover properly. Like how different types of dictators react to economical sanctions, relief, or how to even deal with dictators. I actually wish the west had a look at that part before wrapping up the invincible JCPOA deal with Iran.
Weirdly, Wintrobe’s model predicted the shitshow and now has a really on-point recipe for the next deal. Remember, Iran is on the way to be authoritarian and there’s evidence that the Supreme leader prefers the next talks to be with the next president, which for sure is more aligned with him. Now read this part from the book and let’s see how it ends up:
“Suppose now that we are dealing with a totalitarian dictator. Again, if loyalty
were to increase, on balance, as the result of the trade agreement, the dictator would tend to raise repression, and the binding human rights constraint is necessary to prevent a loss of freedom. The only case for a trade agreement with a totalitarian regime is where the opposite happens, and loyalty to the regime decreases from the trade agreement. In that case, repression falls as well. This is the only case where trade with a totalitarian regime makes sense.”
