Ah so then the end goal of a totalitarian country would be the most good for a small group of insiders. I think this makes sense from a game theory perspective – the reason people would support the defector (in the prisoner’s dilemma) is because they think he has the capacity to succeed and they believe he’ll bring his supporters along with him into the group of beneficiaries of inequality. I think in most of human history it might have worked. So there’s some dysfunctional thing going on where the people support the party who is exploiting them in exchange for a hoped-for advantage over the other members of the exploited class.
My personal favorite Kurt Vonnegut book is ‘Mother Night.’ At one point the narrator is in an Israeli prison awaiting trial for war crimes. He has a conversation with one of his guards. The guard was a prisoner in a concentration camp. Every day the guard would hear an announcement, “Corpse carriers to the guard house.” Every day he heard it, and finally he volunteered for the job.
Ah so then the end goal of a totalitarian country would be the most good for a small group of insiders. I think this makes sense from a game theory perspective – the reason people would support the defector (in the prisoner’s dilemma) is because they think he has the capacity to succeed and they believe he’ll bring his supporters along with him into the group of beneficiaries of inequality. I think in most of human history it might have worked. So there’s some dysfunctional thing going on where the people support the party who is exploiting them in exchange for a hoped-for advantage over the other members of the exploited class.
My personal favorite Kurt Vonnegut book is ‘Mother Night.’ At one point the narrator is in an Israeli prison awaiting trial for war crimes. He has a conversation with one of his guards. The guard was a prisoner in a concentration camp. Every day the guard would hear an announcement, “Corpse carriers to the guard house.” Every day he heard it, and finally he volunteered for the job.