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

using child soldiers or committing crimes against humanity, then you might think twice about doing it because you know that you may not just have to deal with people in your own country, but you might be looking at an extended trip to The Hague or the UK or whatever.

Yeah, so two sides to this. On the one hand, it can be a deterrent, right? Not just the ICC, but all of the other systems of international justice as well. And that may make it less likely that dictators or other leaders commit atrocities. But the flip side of that is that once you have committed those atrocities, you now have an even stronger incentive to try to maintain power.

Yeah, it's almost a caricature of what you would tell people if you told them about a dictator. The whole thing is completely crazy. He wrote this philosophical treatise that then everybody had to study. There were regular study sessions at the ministries. He renamed the days of the week. He put up a statue that rotated with the sun, right? So clever. Just completely not.

And once again, the reason that he could is because it was a dictatorship. And who's going to resist if resisting means imprisonment or death?

It's like running an entire country on the personal whims of a five-year-old on any given day. It's like, okay, I'm not allowed to do this anymore. Nobody is allowed to do this. So for example, there are stories about him not being allowed to smoke anymore because of some health issue. And then he moved to ban smoking for everybody. So it's completely insane.

And I mean, he's not alone in this, right? I mean, there are a bunch of dictatorships that seem crazy. Although what I would say, and I think this is an important point to make, even though a lot of these people might seem crazy, ultimately then my argument is that they're not. Because if they actually were crazy, they would lose power pretty quickly.

So in the book, I looked at a dictator that actually lost his mind, like fully lost his mind and became completely delusional. And what happened is, so this was in Equatorial Guinea during the Cold War. He would walk around his compound crying out the names of the people that he had killed. And in one episode, he would ask his servants to lay the table for eight guests.

And when those guests didn't arrive, he just talked to them as if they were there.

Yeah, and the problem was that even if he had wanted to get it treated, he couldn't because literally every single psychiatrist in the country had either fled or been killed. So you had a situation where the guy in charge with all this power had completely lost his mind and all connection to reality.

And as a result, he lost power very quickly because the people around him decided, look, if we could get killed, whether we oppose this guy or not, We might as well start opposing him because there's no advantage to staying in line. And he was just killing at random. So you need the capacity for rational thought and for weighing risks in order to stay in power.

And if you lose that, you will inevitably lose power.

No, you're right. Natural resources are really great for dictators. And the reason for that is that you can generate a lot of money without being reliant on a lot of people and without necessarily being reliant on competence. So if you go back to Gaddafi, for example, Gaddafi was extremely worried about universities because he thought that as people become more educated...

These universities could become a hotbed for opposing the regime. So he was critical of education as such. And if you have, let's say, oil, or if you have, let's say, diamonds, you don't need to educate people, which in the mind of these dictators is either a waste of money, because that money could also go to their cronies, or is actively dangerous.

And the other good thing about it is that you don't need a lot of competent people. As a dictator, you want to promote for loyalty. If you're choosing your ministers, you don't want to pick people that are actually good at their job at creating good outcomes for the population.

You want to pick people that are fiercely loyal to you, or at least pretending to be, and you want to pick people that are not a threat to you. But obviously, if you do that over and over again, if you don't want to educate your people, and if you don't want to promote competent people, things go bad. But that doesn't really matter if you have oil or if you have diamonds.

So that's part of the reason why a lot of these dictatorships have natural resources.

I think all of these dictators are mentally ill in a way, right? Because these are people who do absolutely terrible things regularly. One day you'd be looking at somebody, you'd be talking to them totally normally. And as they walk out of the office, you would order their death. You have families thrown into jail. You have masses of people killed.

If you're somebody like Vladimir Putin, for example, you would agree to help a regime in Syria that was literally barrel bombing hospitals. So if you do this, and if you can still sleep somehow, you are obviously abnormal. And if you can maintain power in these systems, you need to be paranoid.

You cannot be a quote-unquote normal person who just goes about their day relatively carelessly because if you were, you would die. So you need that paranoia and you need that ability to make all of these horrible decisions and basically go on with your life. So if you don't have it, you are not suitable for this job. What about the military?

You don't, which is why coup d'etat are a major problem for just about every dictator. So if you're a dictator, you usually don't want a military that is actually good at doing the job of a military, which is to fight an external enemy, to protect the country, maybe even fight rebels. But what you do want is a military that is not going to topple you.

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