Comments by "Mikko Rantalainen" (@MikkoRantalainen) on "New York Times Podcasts" channel.

  1. Why do you think dictatorship is a bad thing? I would argue that dictatorship by benevolent leader that's also super smart would be the best possible government model. However, we don't have any reasonable way to find such leaders and even less methods to make sure they continue such model after having all the power for a long time. Yes, in practice dictatorship is typically a bad thing because the society that turns into dictatorship is typically broken and the humans getting into the dictatorship position must have strong dark triad personality traits to reach the position. And such a dictator is very far from benevolent leader.
    3
  2. Pretending that nations are similar to companies is just silly. If you're a worker in a company and you don't agree with the CEO, you can always opt-out and resign and continue your life. If many enough workers do this, the company will fail which causes enough backpressure to prevent the most insane decisions by CEO. If you have an individual with all the power as the leader of the country, citizens cannot resign and continue their life without that leader because that would not only require leaving the company but the whole nation. Unless you believe you can find some benevolent and all-seeing leader for the country, you have to accept that sooner or later the chosen leader will do some shitty decisions and you should have plan ready about what happens then. I see no such planning in Yarvin's ideas.
    1
  3. Thanks for sharing this interview. I think it's important to hear individuals such as Curtis Yarvin with the hope that they actually have some ideas worth executing. However, I heard only stories and poorly thought out ideas/opinions in this interview. For example, it appears that Curtis cannot decide if the leadership should be granted based on meritocracy (e.g. intelligence or some other metric) or inheritance/dynasty. Almost by definition, you cannot have both but Curtis seems to have problems choosing or at least expressing his the strategy that he considers optimal. If Curtis is arguing for pure meritocracy, then we should have seen a lot more discussion about how to decide the best leader(s). Modern systems that often grant more power to persons with strong dark triad person traits are definitely not the way to go if you start giving even more power to individuals.
    1