Dictators like uniformity, dominators like loyalty

Dictators like uniformity, dominators like loyalty

Understanding Donald Trump Series #05

Dictators and Dominators Series #01

You can always assess whether a government leader is a suppressive controller or simply someone who wants to dominate a variety of people. The latter trait is clearly visible today in the 2017 President Of The United States (of America), the POTUS, Donald Trump.
The dictator, by contrast, likes uniformity for he has given up on loyalty. Obedience to a dictator is not gotten from merit but from fear. Often, it starts with obedience from trust that they all work toward a shared vision of the future. Generally, this includes more freedom ("Free China", "Cuba libre", "Lebensraum", "Liberté, Fraternité, Égalité"), but when that vision has been realized, it continues by enforcing
loyalty by means of fear and then genuine leadership detoriates quicly to dictatorship. So, demanding loyalty is a higher level of operation than dictatorship. It is easy to mix them up. Loyalty freaks operate a tad above dictatorship but at least give some leeway, It is far below leading by means of merit.Dictators are so afraid they give nobody any slack at all. The question is how to find the disobedient. The easiest way to find the misfits is by demanding uniformity. Misfits won't obey, so they need be eliminated. No use trying to convince such people.

Mao Tze Tung applied this dictator principle in 1966. Everybody in China had to wear a  worker's suit and study a red booklet. The green attire was meant for the Red Guards that enforced the cultural revolution that started in May 1966 and lasted three years. It almost destroyed Chinese society, destroyed most of its history, killed at least 40 million people on a population of about 350 million.

Uniformity does not work, not with people, not in nature.
The monocultures in agriculture are in fact unusually susceptible to diseases of all kinds. Wheat, corn, cows, pigs, chickens, none of these thrive in narrow spaces without any variety.
The monoculture of Mao was introduced to firmly establish his grip on the population through his instrument, the communistic party. As has become obvious after his dead, there is nobody in China who believes in communism as we in the West understand it, but having a central government that can execute its intentions is not a bad thing if these intentions benefit the population. The cultural revolution of Mao was a failure in the eyes of historians but a success for Mao in testing his control mechanisms.

The West has been baffled by the high quality of leaders that have been the successors of Mao. This is the subject of a separate blog message.
The recent irritation of the Republican Party that three senators did not follow the party line like meek sheep, is a sure sign of deterioration of the Republican Party. Mao at least countered the oppressing uniformity by slogans of the opposite, the most famous one being "Let 1000 flowers bloom."

Neither the Republican Party nor the Democrats came up with a wise alternative to the health care bill that they derogatorily call Obamacare. Obamacare is bad but nobody came up with a better alternative. Donald Trump observed that correctly. It is the first sign of leadership I have seen from him so far. It is a mustard seed but it was there, be it for only a brief moment before it got lost in the avalanche of idiocies that poured out of the White House and press right afterward. Trump wants to dominate, or maybe a more correct phrase3 would be, Trump needs to dominate. But he dominates on the wrong priorities when viewed from the perspective of the purposes of a the function of POTUS. He puts his own private interests firmly in front of anything else. He does not have his priorities right and that makes him not a leader but a dominator.

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