Dr. Marcel Dirsus

speaker

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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

No recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

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

And then I think the other element of that is that a lot about these systems is about status and it's about perceived power and perceived potence almost. So not only do you want to be rich, you want to be the richest because you want to send a signal to the others that, you know, actually I'm the man. I am that guy and you are not.

One of the big differences between democracies and dictatorships is the amount of people that you need to keep on your side in order to take power and maintain it. So if you imagine a democracy where you actually need to win free and fair elections, you need to convince a relatively large share of the population to support you.

And there's going to be another election, and if you lose them, you're going to lose power. But the less democratic your system becomes, the fewer and fewer people you need to maintain on your side. So if you look at something like Kim Jong-un's North Korea, he might only need 200 families in order to maintain power.

And in a way, again, this sounds great because you can ignore just about everybody else. And in many cases, they have. But the problem is the flip side of that, because democratic leaders can afford to lose a lot of people, but dictators cannot. So if Kim Jong-un loses 50 families, you might be done.

So you are in this constant situation where the people closest to you are your biggest threat and losing even a few of them can become a massive issue. So that's why it's so important that you take money and you steal it from the masses, essentially, even if it might be indirect, and you give it to the people that keep you in power. So your oligarchs, your generals, your intelligence officers.

And that's part of the reason why it can never stop. It has to keep moving.

Also, no guarantees, I suppose. Yeah, I got really obsessed with the topic of succession because I think it's really one of the defining weaknesses of dictatorships or non-democratic systems of government in general, right? And we don't talk about it enough. And one of the things that I looked at was the European Middle Ages, around the year 1000.

The way that succession worked is that you were the king, and if you lost power, it would go to your brother. And for many reasons, that was quite a bad system. And the primary weakness that is inherent to this system is that the age difference between the king and his brother tends to be quite small.

So if the brother wants to be king, as a lot of them did want, they would have a massive incentive to kill that brother. the king. And they did. So a lot of those kings got killed. And one alternative that they thought about in the Middle Ages was to basically give money from the king to the youngest child of the king. Because if you do that, you maximize that age difference, right?

If you have a five-year-old and you're 50, that five-year-old can afford to wait. There's no reason why the five-year-old or the 15-year-old would have to take you out. So they thought, okay, that might offer some degree of stability. But it doesn't.

Because the problem with that is that when the successor is too young, that successor cannot credibly signal to the other regime elites, so the people at the court or nowadays the oligarchs or the generals and so forth, that they're going to keep the system itself stable. No. My son is five. I don't trust him with a pair of scissors. They're not going to do that. So they have no allies.

They have no alliance. They can't make that promise credibly. And of course, the regime elites, they don't necessarily care about the king or they don't care about necessarily about the dictator. They care about the system as such because the system is what gives them money and what gives them power.

So the sweet spot that they ultimately settled on was to take the eldest son because the eldest son still had a big age gap, but was more likely to be able to signal credibly that the system would be kept alive, let's say like a 20-year-old. And this massively increased the survival rate of monarchs that switched to the system of granting power to the eldest son. Massive, massive.

They were twice as likely to survive in power. And now you say, okay, that's kings, queens, whatever. That's the Middle Ages. But that same mechanism is still at play. Regime elites still care about the continuation of the regime. So if you look at something like Syria... and you look at the way that succession worked with the Assads, you have the same mechanism at play, right?

So you had Bashar al-Assad's father, who came to power many decades ago. And when he was no longer around, Syrian regime elites had to ask themselves, okay, what's next? And in the end, what they decided on was Bashar al-Assad.

Not because Bashar al-Assad was seen as this great leader who was perfect for the job, but because they thought that if they agreed to him, they could avoid a costly sort of war between each other, like within the regime. And ultimately, that's what they wanted to avoid. They wanted to avoid a war within the regime. They just wanted the regime to keep surviving because that's how you get the money.

That's how you get the power. So the same mechanism is still at play in the variants that it was. hundreds and hundreds of years ago.

Like, why not try something like that? Yeah, it can work. And sometimes it has worked. And if it does, it reduces the chance that you're going to end up being killed or being imprisoned. But the problem is that none of these leaders have absolute power. So this idea that this is a decision that they could make themselves is absurd, right?

So even though they might want to turn the country into a democracy... They might not be able to do so because, let's say, the generals might say, you know what, I would rather serve a dictatorship because this is what guarantees me money than turn the country into a democracy. A, they can't necessarily decide it themselves because they're relying on these other people.

And a lot of these other people might want to make sure that the regime survives. And the other problem is that... If the country does actually turn into a democracy, how are voters going to feel about these leaders going unpunished? So if you have a dictatorship and they've been harassing people, they've been imprisoning people, they've been torturing people, and the dictator says, you know what?

Showing 41–60 of 177 · page 3 of 9