I disagree. I think it's mostly because geeks like effective solutions.
Dictatorships, despite all their scary failure modes, have one very good feature democracies lack - they get things done. When there's a new power plant to be built or transportation project to be realized, they just happen. There's no need to pander to clueless people bitching about things they don't understand. No anti-nuclear movements, no NIMBYsm, etc. No decision-making overheads because various politicians are bribed to support different groups. No pandering to electorate. If it needs to be done, it just gets done. In contrast, western governments are pretty much incapable of any serious action on anything that matters.
I think this is the very reason geeks seem to worship benevolent dictatorships. They're just efficient. It's maintaining the benevolent part that is hard.
> Dictatorships, despite all their scary failure modes, have one very good feature democracies lack - they get things done... I think this is the very reason geeks seem to worship benevolent dictatorships. They're just efficient.
Not really -- or at least, not necessarily. Modern scholarship on Nazi Germany, for instance, has found that despite its much-vaunted efficiency it was actually a morass of feuding power centers all fighting each other to get Hitler's ear, which resulted in massive inefficiencies that in the end contributed materially to their loss in World War II. Fascist Italy was much the same way. And even the dictator himself didn't help matters -- look at the story of the revolutionary Me 262 jet fighter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt_Me_262), which arrived too late to help Germany fend off the Allied bomber offensive because Hitler decided apropos of nothing midway through development that it should be completely retooled to function as a bomber instead.
Dictatorships look efficient, because they tend to focus resources on high-profile prestige projects of the kind that would never get off the ground in a democracy because they make absolutely no economic sense. If you build a pyramid, people are gonna look at it and say "wow, those people sure can get things done." But in their everyday operation they run according to the whims of the dictator, which hurts efficiency rather than helping it.
Thanks for the Messerschmitt story, haven't heard of that before.
> projects of the kind that would never get off the ground in a democracy because they make absolutely no economic sense.
I think here's the crux of the problem. Not everything that makes economic sense is good, especially if we're talking about current, greedy (as in, locally optimizing) economy. Sticking to fossil fuels until very end makes economic sense. Not investing in basic research makes economic sense. Slave labour makes economic sense. Stupid resource-wasting zero-sum games like political campaigns or advertising make economic sense.
Among all the good things it does, following the economy also leads to completely batshit insane decisions. This is, I think, what many geeks have problem with. They seek solutions that are powerful enough to get us out of the holes we're in despite the economy.
> And even the dictator himself didn't help matters
An even better example would be the ongoing investment in prestige battleships when it was the U-boat fleet that brought Britain to within a fortnight of surrender.
>have one very good feature democracies lack - they get things done.
I think this is a misconception. Chaotic system almost exclusively defeat planned systems. A chaotic market will beat communist central planning every time. A chaotic fight for life via evolution will beat robots every time, etc.
Humanity's greatest achievements have been done under largely western, open, and democratic societies (for various definitions of) from ancient Greece to what the US and EU has been able to do. While autocratic systems have their success stories, they're more rare and often hit a wall due to the natural of autocracy (threaten the political order, favor system stopping innovation).
You're using an American OS on an American network stack and American root DNS and American URLs on an American designed CPU in English at an American website to have this conversation for a reason.
I suggest you check out Kelly's Out of Control or Taleb's Anti-Fragile.
While it's true in general that chaotic systems tend to fare better than planned in our world, I think the problem is with limitations of human cognitive capabilities, not with the idea of planned systems per se.
For one, there's a reason that successful designs tend to have one person's vision (even if many are involved in actual construction). We all know "design by committee".
Secondly,
> A chaotic market will beat communist central planning every time.
I am starting to believe that central planning has failed so spectacularly because people can't handle that much complexity in their heads + you actually have a distributed system. If we tried that again, but with computerized economy and a centralized algorithm running global optimization, I think it could fare much better than previously, and much better than distributed market systems we have today. Yes, it will cost us some economic freedom, but this very freedom is what is driving humanity to its grave by destroying the environment and pretending we're not running out of cheap energy.
> A chaotic fight for life via evolution will beat robots every time, etc.
This I strongly disagree with. "Chaotic fight for life" works almost infinitely slower than human mind it crafted. It might have evolved a dog over half a millenium, but Boston Dynamics got halfway there over few years. We can optimize better and iterate faster. Evolution is cool and all, but let's not discount the minds we have and the fact that they, not biological evolution, are now the driving force on the planet.
Dictatorships, despite all their scary failure modes, have one very good feature democracies lack - they get things done. When there's a new power plant to be built or transportation project to be realized, they just happen. There's no need to pander to clueless people bitching about things they don't understand. No anti-nuclear movements, no NIMBYsm, etc. No decision-making overheads because various politicians are bribed to support different groups. No pandering to electorate. If it needs to be done, it just gets done. In contrast, western governments are pretty much incapable of any serious action on anything that matters.
I think this is the very reason geeks seem to worship benevolent dictatorships. They're just efficient. It's maintaining the benevolent part that is hard.