Lying up - the fatal flaw of autocracy

There is a fundamental flaw to autocracies, plutocracies, oligarchies, authoritarians, dictators.  The fatal flaw is what Thomas Friedman calls “lying up”.  Nobody wants to tell the frightening authoritarian boss bad news. So they don’t.  Any actual information that is gotten on the lower rungs of the hierarchy gets watered down or just outright changed to happy-face news by the time it gets to the tyrant on top.  The reality remains the reality, but the tyrants do stupid things like Russian invasion of Ukraine and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan based upon bad info from below.  

They have the same problem domestically.  One of the most famous and disastrous dictatorships was the Soviet Union. Production dropped and dropped and dropped.  The internal joke that says it all – “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay.”

 It is not just Communist and Socialist dictatorships that fail due to lies from the bottom, but right wing as well as left wing tyrants become more and more isolated and lied to – Hitler of Germany, Mussolini of Italy, Salazar of Portugal, Papadopoulos of Greece, Batista of Cuba, etc.  It looks like dictators insulate themselves in self-congratulatory information bubbles and fail as a result. 

I certainly hope that will be the case for Russia’s Putin (and America’s Former Guy).

Interestingly, it appears that Putin is to undergo an intestinal cancer surgery.  Here's hoping that he becomes too incapacitated to fight off his overthrow and those who replace him are smart enough to see what a disaster this terrible invasion of Ukraine has been to Russia and call it off - just go ahead and blame Putin and say that he was not of his sound mind because of his disease and the drugs he was under.  Works for me