The problem we’re faced with right now is less conservative vs progressive, and more liberal democracy vs authoritarian autocracy. Pence represented a move towards autocracy that strained, but did not outright break, the bounds of liberal democracy.

Musk, Thiel, and all of the techbros trying to push us towards monarchism functionally *are* Roko's Basilisk, just stripped of the technobabble that makes it sound like an exotic or novel problem.

Lol- yeah. And that particular root seems fairly innocent.

My guess is that the overlap between the meme and the reference to dukedom in the city state context was too much to pass up for Musk.

In Venice, the Doge was the head of state, elected for life by the oligarchy.

Elon isn’t president. He’s Duke- and he’s not even hiding it.

This isn’t hidden or obscured. The spelling is exactly the same.

The hegemonic cultural influence of Western Enlightenment is worth critiquing, but to think that fascist regimes would do better if they had less brain drain seems to miss the part where the rigorous adherence needed for fascist ideology to be upheld creates hostile environments for intellectuals.

He seems to be making some major- and egregiously incorrect- assumptions about what causes the intellectuals to abandon the 'courts' of these 'modern monarchies'.

He seems to think that intellectuals are blindly pulled into western enlightenment and miss how fascism actively pushes them away.

The thing I like about that kind of conjecturing though is that it can be give insights for how to manage collective intelligence- society.

Democracy basically tells authorities that they don't know what they'll be assessed by until they're actually assessed- so they have to hedge their bets.

If you told it to make everyone happy, it might do it in a way that collapses the economy. If you tell it to make the economy perfect, it might do it in a way that makes everyone miserable. If it's not sure which one it's supposed to pursue, it has to try to balance them.

That's the theory, anyway.

The more centralized executive authority, the fewer mandates there are to benefit from those diverse perspectives.

Authoritarianism is inherently brittle.

Responsible leadership on any scale *requires* input of diverse perspectives in order to identify and mitigate problems that are only visible to certain subgroups.

One of the strengths of democratic governance is it has built-in, if often underutilized, structures that encourage diverse input.