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Authoritarian personality cults and signalling games

- March 14, 2011

Xavier Marquez has an “intriguing hypothesis”:http://abandonedfootnotes.blogspot.com/2011/03/simple-model-of-cults-of-personality.html.

Cults of personality are hardly ever taken seriously enough. They are often seen as a sort of bizarre curiosity found in some authoritarian regimes, their absurdities attributed to the extreme narcissism and megalomania of particular dictators, who wish to be flattered with ever greater titles and deified in ever more grandiose ways. …

bq. In 2006 Nodong Sinmun published an article titled ”Military-First Teleporting” claiming that Kim Jong-il, ”the extraordinary master commander who has been chosen by the heavens,” appears in one place and then suddenly appears in another ”like a ?ash of lightning,” so quickly that the American satellites overhead cannot track his movements.

To the extent that cults of personality are taken seriously, moreover, they are often analyzed in terms of their effects on the _beliefs_ of the people who are exposed to them. … But this way of thinking about cults of personality misses the point, I think. Not because it is entirely wrong; it is certainly plausible that some people do come to believe in the special charisma of the leader _because_ they have been exposed to the propaganda of the cult since they were children, though the evidence for this is scarce. Yet, though I do not want to deny that cults of personality can sometimes “persuade” people of the superhuman character of leaders …, they are best understood in terms of how dictators can harness the dynamics of “signalling” for the purposes of social control.

One of the main problems dictators face is that repression creates liars (preference falsification, in the jargon), yet it is necessary for them to remain in power. This is sometimes called the dictator’s dilemma: it is hard for dictators to gauge their true levels of support … Here is where cults of personality come in handy. The dictator wants a credible signal of your support; merely staying silent and not saying anything negative won’t cut it. In order to be credible, the signal has to be costly: you have to be willing to say that the dictator is not merely ok, but a superhuman being, and you have to be willing to take some concrete actions showing your undying love for the leader. … Here the concrete action required of you is typically a willingness to denounce others when they fail to say the same thing, but it may also involve bizarre pilgrimages, ostentatious displays of the dictator’s image, etc.

What makes cults of personality interesting, however, is that the more baroque and over the top, the better (though the “over the top” level needs to be achieved by small steps), since differences in signals of commitment indicate _gradations_ of personal support of the dictator, and hence give the dictator a reasonable measurement of his true level of support that is not easily available to the public.

I’m only excerpting the necessary basic elements of the argument – to get the full flavor of the post you need to read it in its entirety. I’m not sure that the argument is entirely _right_ on the demand side – it seems to me entirely plausible that dictators (like, in a much more attenuated way, Hollywood stars) may find themselves in their very own reality distortion field, and believe more strongly in the love of their people than the facts would warrant. Even so, se non e completamente vero, e sicuramente ben trovato.

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