Dr. Marcel Dirsus

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177 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2025 last heard Jan 2025

Dr. Marcel Dirsus’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Jordan Harbinger Show · 1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive · 14 Jan 2025 podcast

And stepping down voluntarily is extremely difficult too. So I call this the dictator's treadmill. So at the moment that you assume power, you risk getting stuck because in order to be in power as a dictator, you have to do horrible things regularly, right? You have to harass people. You put them in prison. You might have people killed. You steal from your people and so forth.

And at the moment where you want to step down, there's a massive risk of that catching up with you. Doing so is inevitably a risk. And part of the problem is that you would have to find somebody to replace you who would be powerful enough to protect you, but not so powerful that they can get rid of you.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. You're looking at a guy who has reportedly had somebody blown up with an anti-aircraft gun for falling asleep in a meeting. This is the type of regime that we're talking about. And as you say, this type of transparency, at first it sounds good from the perspective of the dictator because like, well, nobody can criticize you really.

And if they do, you can put them in a gulag or you can have them killed or whatever. But ultimately, a lot of these dictators fall into a trap because the system is set up this way. So as they promote for loyalty and not for competence, and people who speak the truth get purged over and over again, you do end up with these yes men.

Obviously, if everybody constantly agrees with you because they don't want to be sent to a gulag, that's not conducive to good policymaking. And again, it's not great for a healthy mind, right? We've seen a lot of the times in history that this leads dictators to basically detach from reality. Like they don't really know what's going on anymore.

And as a result, they can make mistakes because they become overly confident.

Yeah, I think Putin is a really interesting case. I talked to a lot of Russia experts while writing this, right? And what some of them argued is that essentially as Putin came in, he would listen to a lot of people that were technocrats. So these might have been people that previously ran a bank or they were like managers. They cared a lot about the economy. They wanted things to work, right?

If only because they wanted to make sure that the people who were at the top got more money. But as time went on, Putin started listening more and more to people that were more like him, intelligence officers in particular, but also people from the military. And obviously, these people have a certain mindset, right?

I mean, if you spent three decades in the KGB and you constantly see threats lurking everywhere, you have a certain way of looking at the world and you transfer that to the people that you're advising, in a sense. When he was making decisions, for example, with regard to Ukraine... These were the people that he was listening to. And they were telling him, no luck. The Americans are aggressive.

They're encroaching on our territory. We have to do something now. And then he would. And over time, he would become more and more belligerent. And then there would be a Western reaction. And then that Western reaction would seemingly confirm what the hawks from the intelligence service had been telling him. So they got even more powerful. So gradually you just detach. I see.

What are those people called again? Like Siloviki or something? You know what I'm talking about?

So men at arms almost. The intelligence services, basically, right? The people sort of working in the shadows.

So first of all, a lot of the people that take power are not in countries like the US or in modern Germany, right? So oftentimes you're looking at poorer countries where there might not be a lot of opportunity. or where the political system might already be disastrous. So it's not as if you are coming into power and creating a dictatorship, but there's already some sort of dictator.

And if there's already somebody like that, it might as well be you. But also the opportunities for enrichment are absolutely endless. Some of these people are literally embezzling billions, right? Money doesn't even go into the state budget. You don't even have to steal from the budget. You just divert it to your Swiss bank account straight away.

You can do all kinds of things, right? The easiest thing to imagine is something that is state-owned, right? Let's say you're coming out of an economic system where the state basically almost owned everything, and then you sell that off. Maybe there's some sort of kickback because you sell it to them at a much lower price than its real value.

Or perhaps somebody has an issue with the tax authorities and they want to make it go away. So they pay a little fee, but that fee is 200 million. So there are all types of ways. And then obviously you don't take the money yourself, but make sure it's a friend or it's a relative or it's in a bank account that can't be found and all the rest of it. And the best of these people...

I don't want to sound as if I'm admiring them, right? Let's say the most effective, that they're sort of, quote unquote, out of dictatorship. They don't have to explicitly tell people what to do because they do it out of their own accord because they want to please the leader or they want to avoid something bad happening to them. So things run on autopilot almost at some point.

Yeah, well, from the dictator's perspective, being completely cynical and just thinking in terms of cost benefit, the question is, is that worth it? Because obviously you can put down people and you can repress them to an extent. But if you retain some sort of plausible deniability... you will have to beat down fewer people. And beating people is a risky proposition oftentimes.

So you want to avoid it if you can. And really, realistically to Putin, it doesn't make a difference. He's got his properties. He's got his money. He will never need more money again in his life. There's no point. It's just not worth taking the risk.

I think, honestly, I mean, first of all, I would say that even in democratic societies, you have this phenomenon, right? Although not with political leaders necessarily. But I mean, I ask myself that about billionaires sometimes. It's like, come on, man, you have 50 billion. What more do you need? So I think part of it is not specific to dictatorships, but it's just about humans being humans.

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