Authoritarian Structures Are Not Stable

There's been a handful of podcasts that have made the observation that Vladimir Putin doesn't tend to get within 20 ft of very many people. It appears as though he's paranoid about who he's around. That isn't inherently something that would be unusual for most authoritarian rulers. In fact it's typically rather normal for those who run authoritarian regimes to have to be concerned about their own safety. It is something that comes with the territory.

This shouldn't really be a big surprise for anybody who studied the history of authoritarian regimes. Contrary to what some portray them as, any system that has uses coercion as its central means of enforcing the law is also inherently unstable. Whether it's one person or a small group of people in charge they spend most of their time trying to make sure they don't lose power. This by nature will mean that the regime is more paranoid than anything else.

At the core of most of the problems is that the ruler and those that they're ruling over become increasingly detached in this sort of arrangement. The lack of connection between those they're making decisions and everyone else means that there isn't reasonable amounts of information being shared between the two sides. For whatever somebody might say dictators don't know what life on the street typically entails. Or at the very least they have no understanding of that particular moment. As such most of their decrees tend to be more surrounding what the upper echelons of society view as being necessary.

Something that is usually not considered with any authoritarian regime is how much organisational structure needs to be constantly considered. If you are going to use decrees to force things on a population there has to be constant attention paid to how you carry out those orders. This is why militaries are frequently employed as the primary bureaucracy components within dictatorships. They come naturally trained for that line of work.  But this also stands out as one of the primary reasons a number of civilians have tried and failed when it comes to trying to concentrate power. They simply don't have the ability to organise the necessary administration.

 This also says nothing of how the enforcement mechanisms have to be structured to make sure that if somebody falls out of line you do something about it. In order for any authoritarian regime to maintain its position there has to be a sense within the broader public that if they don't comply something unpleasant is going to happen to them. It's not unheard of for somebody to simply disappear as a demonstration regardless of whether they behave themselves or not.

The argument over whether or not dictators have natural disposition towards paranoia in their personality in some respects misses the point on a practical level. This sort of enforcement that needs to be constantly minded will mean that even the most non paranoid person will develop a form of compulsion on this front. To put it mildly it would not be healthy for somebody to be exposed to that sort of thinking for any length of time. 

It's one of the early arguments of classical Antiquity but if a democracy could function it would be more stable simply because the population tended to support whatever their government was doing. Ideally that's usually the truth but at least with most  free systems there is some means of removing those in office. From that standpoint the population is much more likely to be docile. Or at the very least the population finds means that are less destructive to deal with governments they don't like.

One of the problems with centralised authority is there's no feedback as to how popular any particular policy might be. Instead you're going more on vibes or a general feeling of what might work. This isn't just problematic from not having correct information but not being able to get information in the first place.

 In order for any political structure to be able to function it needs  some ability to adapt as the society shifts. For governments in society that have some kind of feedback mechanism that allows the government to change policies based on public input. Even if that isn't specifically through voting. This is one of the primary reasons anybody who's criticised authoritarian regimes or socialist regimes one of the common points is the lack of information causing the system to become static. Single decision makers might be able to read something in a moment, but they struggle when circumstances are frequently changing.

Authoritarianism might work if nothing ever changed because you would be able to stay in the status quo easily. As soon as there's any shift the entire structure starts to wobble. 

One of the primary reasons that top-down societies tend to become stuck in place as far as any sort of technological advance or economic shifts. There's no mechanism for innovation to work. The world outside the system changes, it becomes not only increasingly backward but it also becomes increasingly out of alignment with other systems that it has to interact with. 

Seeing an authoritarian ruler try and keep his distance from would be threats isn't that surprising. History also demonstrates it's not something that is inherently paranoid. The third Roman Emperor Caligula was assassinated by his bodyguards. Numerous other Prefects in other territories were regularly assassinated by family members. All of this due to the fact that the entire structure relied on the trust of one person. That's not inherently stable.

 Whenever we're dealing with authoritarian regimes it's worth bearing this in mind. they aren't on top of a particularly robust system.It needs to be remembered whenever you're dealing with this sort of political structure, the ruling party's primary concern  typically has large measures of survival being one of its primary objectives.