No Stupid Questions

so, every argument in favor of autocracy works based on magical thinking.

autocracies have one point of articulation. it might be a very clever point of articulation, but there is only one of them. simply meaning: it's very hard to govern a diverse group-culturally, geographically, or otherwise- with the orders of one guy. then you have to rely on other people to actually carry out those orders, to interpret them at various levels down to, say, putting bricks on top of each other or shooting dudes. which means they always have to act in deference to an imagined version of this one guy. why would they do that? how do they feel about that? how fucked in the head do they have to get to reliably execute his orders pretty much as he would wish them, even assuming that isn't regularly a terrible fucking idea?

now, you can solve this by giving the people under the autocrat a lot of autonomy. say, "hey army, go conquer this place" and give the army resources and have them go do that, with no more interference from the autocrat. now that's no longer the autocrat's accomplishment. now you have to count on the loyalty of all those now battle hardened officers, from captains to generals/admirals, to not think they're better leaders than the autocrat. and they probably have the loyalty of all their troops, who just either won a war, or got their asses kicked in a nonsense war they had to fight but could not have won. autocratic armies, for example, tend to be a lot more brittle and a lot more reliant on rigid ineffective command structures than democratic armies. but it's not just war-everything is like, that, everyone has to be controlled by pissy political maneuvering at all times, so they don't try to be the autocrat and just kill the last guy. but it gets even more complicated! see, near the end of world war one, and there's a lot of argument that this is the thing that caused the end of world war one, there was a new (well, resurrected from one particular group in ancient greece) military doctrine: that power should be devolved (put lower on the power structure) as much as possible, with more tactical and operational decisions going to people of lower ranks. this worked ridiculously well. but this also means there are more people practiced at giving orders and keeping loyalty in your military. which is very very dangerous to an autocrat, especially if those people are pretty good at war/killing.

the core concept of democracy, and one that neoliberalism absolutely does not buy into, is that if a society is clearly in everyone's best interest, and stays egalitarian enough, with nobody totally left behind and everybody given at least a chance, then nobody will try to fuck with the system too much, and anybody who does will be dragged out into the street and made an example of by just about everyone around them. and this, to a shocking extent, does actually seem to work as long as it's applied. egalitarian societies with a less focused power structure do seem more resilient on average against power struggles and the regular shocks a civilization might suffer. the problem is they get fucked up and less egalitarian over time, because nothing is stable, humans are complicated, and entropy is a bitch.

like, armies. okay, so, which is better, a huge conscript army, or a small core of focused professional-by caste(knights! jannisaries! etc!) or volunteer(think the american system)-soldiers?

you might think this is a question of 'lots of barely competent soldiers' vs 'a small handful of badass operators'. and that factors in, kinda, but it's not actually the main difference. it's loyalty, and how your society reacts to the routine costs of war. who comes back from war trained and capable of fighting the government? who suffers at home when half your army gets killed in ten minutes because you did a whoopsie, or the people you were fighting were awesome, or luck just wasn't on your side? who sees spoils and plunder? if you're fighting a defensive war against an aggressor with genocidal war aims, a conscript army actually works pretty well, with very few down sides. if you're fighting an obviously nonsense imperial boondoggle, using conscripts is a good way to get your entire ruling class beheaded.

it's all complex as fuck, and it's all weirder than you would think. generally though; a more egalitarian society, where decisions can be varied and adaptive, without deference to some dipshit in nuremberg/constantinople/versailles, is more adaptive, more stable, and more functional.

that said, there are different things that make these societies work. autocracies are most stable when the populace is stupid, xenophobic, and stratified enough that when someone in the mid levels of power fucks people over at the king's explicit orders, the peasants can say "damn I bet if the king/fuhrer/presidentforlife knew about this, he'd fucking hang the bastard". democratic egalitarian societies are most stable and functional when the populace is educated, informed, and empowered.

in practice these power structures are never quite as a binary. the anthropologist david graeber did a lot of really cool work on this. 'on kings' which he co-wrote with marshal sahlins and 'the dawn of everything: a new history of humanity' which he co-wrote with the archaeologist david wengrow, are fucking great reads. read them instead of my inchoate text wall; I'm delirious as fuck right now.