That's what's it's going to be because that's the only thing that works. I'm not overly thrilled with it either. Please give me some benefit of the doubt. I didn't read the Dictator's Handbook because I wanted to become part of a corrupt power structure and such on the teet of patronage until either, I die or the state collapses. I wanted to understand why dictatorships, especially the worst kinds in Africa are so rock stable and what can be done about them. The results are fascinating. But first, you can't understand political science until you throw conventional morality out the window. Might doesn't make right, but the strong do what they can and the weak endure what they must unless it kills them and then it is the end.
There are happy endings in this world, but they must be earned and they are always bittersweet. The good news is that the Richard Spencer closet Neo-Nazis are so feared and so hated it's the only thing that has kept white nationalism from going mainstream. White people are afraid of them too. What we're probably gonna get is not a Hitler, but an Attaturk, ethnic deportations instead of genocide, a Treaty of Lausanne, rather than a return to the horrors of the Jim Crow era.
Thing is, these are humans you're dealing with. Fear is the appropriate response. All life, but especially humans are glass cannons, very easy to injure and kill, very destructive in our attacks. This means humans have to both paranoid and aggressive. We as individuals cannot tank,. and given the increasing plethora of weapons of mass destruction, neither can out societies. This cannot abolish war, MAD cannot abolish war, because what makes man, man, not even makes man great is his ambition and ruthless opportunism.
This is not about humanity. This is about the structure of power. We do not live in a moral universe. This universe punishes folly and hubris, not wickedness, at least in and of itself. That's why Stalin prospered in everything he did until the day he died. I mean yeah, he died paralyzed from a stroke, but he was only like that for a few days. Last year my grandma had a stroke and was paralyzed for MONTHS, finally refusing to eat and coming home to die. Josef Stalin, Kim Il Sung, Mao, Tamerlane, nearly every Mamluk Sultan, Ivan the Terrible, they were horrible tyrannical monsters, and they won at life. They died in power, in wealth, breaking and killing any who stood in their path. To say nothing of almost every cruel, utilitarian slave master in all of history, every Simon Legree, every guy who ever worked his slaves to death because there were a thousand more, and this would include Peter the Great, a guy who was trying to save Russia from it's worst impulses and recklessly went through serf lives trying to build a city from a swamp as quickly as possible.
