Poradnik dyktatora

One important lesson we will learn is that where politics are concerned, ideology, nationality, and culture don’t matter all that much. The sooner we learn not to think or utter sentences such as “the United States should do . . . ”or “the American people want . . . ” or “China’s government ought to do . . . ,” the better we will understand government, business, and all other forms of organization. When addressing politics, we must accustom ourselves to think and speak about the actions and interests of specific, named leaders rather than thinking and talking about fuzzy ideas like the national interest, the common good, and the general welfare. Once we think about what helps leaders come to and stay in power, we will also begin to see how to fix politics. Politics, like all of life, is about individuals, each motivated to do what is good for them, not what is good for others.

In politics, as in life, we all have desires and contend with obstacles that keep us from getting what we want. A government’s rules and laws, for example, limit what we can do. Those in power differ from the rest of us: they can design rules to their advantage and make it easier for them to get what they want. Understanding what people want and how they get it can go a long way to clarifying why those in power often do bad things. In fact, bad behavior is more often than not good politics. This dictum holds up whether one governs a tiny town, a mom-and-pop business, a megacorporation, or a global empire.

What remarkable puzzles politics provides. Every day’s headlines shock and surprise us. Daily we hear of frauds, chicanery, and double-dealing by corporate executives, new lies, thefts, cruelties and even murders perpetrated by government leaders. We cannot help but wonder what flaws of culture, religion, upbringing, or historical circumstance explain the rise of these malevolent despots, greedy Wall Street bankers, and unctuous oil barons. Is it true, as Shakespeare’s Cassius said, that the fault lies not in the stars but in ourselves? Or, more particularly, in those who lead us? Most of us are content to believe that. And yet the truth is far different.
Too often we accept the accounts of historians, journalists, pundits, and poets without probing beneath the surface to discover deeper truths that point neither to the stars nor to ourselves. The world of politics is dictated by rules. Short is the term of any ruler foolish enough to govern without submitting to these rules to rule by.
Journalists, authors, and academics have endeavored to explain politics through storytelling. They’ll explore why this or that leader seized power, or how the population of a far-flung country came to revolt against their government, or why a specific policy enacted last year has reversed the fortunes of millions of lives. And in the explanations of these cases, a journalist or historian can usually tell us what happened, and to whom, and maybe even why. But beneath the particulars of the many political stories and histories we read are a few questions that seem to emerge time after time, some profound, some seemingly minor, but all nagging and enduring in the back of our minds: How do tyrants hold on to power for so long? For that matter, why is the tenure of successful
democratic leaders so brief? How can countries with such misguided and corrupt economic policies survive for so long? Why are countries that are prone to natural disasters so often unprepared when they happen? And how can lands rich with natural resources at the same time support populations stricken with poverty?
Equally, we may well wonder: Why are Wall Street executives so politically tone-deaf that they dole out billions in bonuses while plunging the global economy into recession? Why is the leadership of a corporation, on whose shoulders so much responsibility rests, decided by so few people? Why are failed CEOs retained and paid handsomely even as their company’s shareholders lose their shirts? In one form or another, these questions of political behavior pop up again and again. Each explanation, each story, treats the errant leader and his or her faulty decision making as a one-off, one-of-a-kind situation.
But there is nothing unique about political behavior.

While most of us think of a state’s bankruptcy as a financial crisis, looking through the prism of political survival makes evident that it really amounts to a political crisis. When debt exceeds the ability to pay, the problem for a leader is not so much that good public works must be cut back, but rather that the incumbent doesn’t have the resources necessary to purchase political loyalty from key backers. Bad economic times in a democracy mean too little money to fund pork-barrel projects that buy political popularity.

The big questions of how the world ought to be are indeed important. But they are not our focus. Questions of philosophical values and metaphorical abstractions—these simply don’t apply to the view of politics that we’ll present in the pages ahead. We do not start with a desire to say what we think ought to be. It is hard to imagine that anyone, including ourselves, cares much about what we think ought to be. Neither do we exhort others to be better than they are. Not that we do not hope to find ways to improve the world according to our lights. But then, we believe that the world can only be improved if first we understand how it works and why. Working out what makes people do what they do in the realm of politics is fundamental to working out how to make it in their interest to do better things.

Now there is no doubt that Montesquieu, Madison, Hobbes, and Machiavelli were very clever and insightful thinkers (and surely brighter than us). However, they got an awful lot of politics wrong simply because they were coping with momentary circumstances. They were looking at but a small sample of data, the goings-on surrounding them, and bits and pieces of ancient history. They also lacked modern tools of analysis (which we, luckily, have at our disposal). Consequently, they leapt to partially right, but often deeply wrong, conclusions. In all fairness to these past luminaries, their shortcomings often have to do with the fact that, besides being bound by their then-present contexts, these thinkers were also caught up in “the big questions”—what the highest nature of man ought to be, or what the “right” state of government really is, or what “justice” truly means in political terms. This shortsightedness extends not only to history’s legends in political thought, but also to contemporary thinkers like Jürgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, and John Rawls—thinkers who someday may be viewed in the same light.

In this book, we’re going to provide a way to make sense of the miserable behavior that characterizes many— maybe most—leaders, whether in government or business. Our aim is to explain both good and bad conduct without resorting to ad hominem claims. At its heart, this will entail untangling the reasoning and reasons behind how we are governed and how we organize.
The picture we paint will not be pretty. It will not strengthen hope for humankind’s benevolence and altruism. But we believe it will be the truth and it will point the way to a brighter future. After all, even if politics is nothing more than a game that leaders play, if only we learn the rules, it becomes a game we can win.
To improve the world, however, all of us must first suspend faith in conventional wisdom. Let logic and evidence be the guide and our eyes will be opened to the reasons why politics works the way it does. Knowing how and why things are as they are is a first, crucial step toward learning how to make them better.

We’re still surprised by the prevalence of drought-induced food shortages in Africa, 3,500 years after the pharaohs worked out how to store grain. We’re still shocked by the devastation of earthquakes and tsunamis in places like Haiti, Iran, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka, and by the seemingly lesser intensity of such natural disasters in North America and Europe. We’re still troubled by the friendly handshakes and winks exchanged between democratic leaders and the tyrants that they somehow justify empowering.

These stories of the horrible things politicians or business executives do are appealing in their own perverse way because they free us to believe we would behave differently if given the opportunity. They liberate us to cast blame on the flawed person who somehow, inexplicably, had the authority to make monumental—and monumentally bad—decisions. We are confident that we would never act like Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi who bombed his own people to keep himself in power. We look at the huge losses suffered under Kenneth Lay’s leadership by Enron’s employees, retirees, and shareholders and think we aren’t like Kenneth Lay. We look at each case and conclude they are different, uncharacteristic anomalies. Yet they are held together by the logic of politics, the rules ruling rulers.

By expanding the pool of people who could be in the inner circle, he made political survival for those already in that role more competitive. Those who were privileged to be in his winning coalition knew that under the enlarged pool of candidates for such positions, any one of them could easily be replaced if they did not prove sufficiently trustworthy and loyal to the king. That, in turn, meant they could lose their opportunity for wealth, power, and privilege. Few were foolish enough to take such a risk.