How to create a authoritatrian society?

Introduction
This page is a collection of thoughts on how an authoritarian society or dictator could be created. The intension of this is to encourage critical thought and spark debate.

No commentary is made on whether this is good or not. Although it would be interesting to investigate the subject and formulate a moral position.

This page was emailed to a number of friends on 25th February 2010 and their responses have been appended to this page.

1. Punishment
Not simply physical punishment, but other forms of deterrence e.g. removal of privileges.

2. Rewards
Reward those who exhibit the beliefs you want them to accept.
3. Emotive imagery and manipulation
Create iconic images of authority, sport them on street corners. Have them benign as a “caring big brother” or as a Orwellian reminder that you are being monitored.
4. Social pressure
Stimatise certain questions and beliefs, make it embarrassing or event shameful.
5. Repetition
Mindless repetition or key words and phrases, perhaps requires social pressure to really work.
6. Control and Censorship
Remove alternative systems of belief/eliminate material which contradicts the regime.
7. Isolation
Isolatation from “non-believers”, possibly just another form of censorship.
8. Uncertainty
Highlight the uncertainty and insecurities of non-believers and offer simple rules which can remove this uncertainty.
9. Tribalism
Encourage “us and them” thinking, encourage “us” to be noble and “them” to be amoral.

Responses

Mike
Cheers, Sanj – very interesting!!! I was looking at these points and trying to work out how many had been deployed by our current political masters (irrespective of party political allegiance) – at least 3 or 4 in my opinion… reaffirms my belief that our political leaders no longer feel that they are servants to the country.
Mukesh
The characteristics you’ve outlined are mostly reminiscent of the good old USA under a certain George W Bush !! – just shows how easy it would be for even the most advanced democracies to tip into an authoritarian regime.
Another characteristic of authoritarian regimes is public disdain for any form of intelligentsia to choke off all notions of ‘free thought’ – so, you’d definitely end up in a ‘gulag’!
Championing causes like ‘a fairer deal for the majority’ usually creates a strong following for authoritarian leaders, so watch out for that recently outed bully, a certain Mr G Brown !!
As regards formulating a moral position, methinks I’d better get back to my beer for some inspiration – cheers,
Steve
Sit down Sanj and take deep breaths….
Interesting idea though. As per 1984, you need to maintain a state of permanent war so that there is always an enemy to create some sort of common cause….
Oh and it would be nice if you could create some sort of website that people could use to keep Big Brother updated on their movements….you could call it something daft like Facebook
Brian
WTF!……Whose round is it?
Cecil
yours . Friday 19th London
Bharat
Having read it and re read it, in a way we already have all the ingredients in play at present in our society, the only difference is that at present; when we can , if we can, if we want to, we move on to another circle of human connections be it at work or social life, but overall there is no escape from the society element as we can run from it for some time but overall we generally we cannot hide from the control element all of the time.
Thus our current model is subtle but otherwise a perfect authoritarian model as depicted by your notes.
Darren
10. History
Selective re-writing of history to reinforce your position. At best most people have a general, episodic view of their own history. Real world examples show how dictatorships have cherry-picked and distorted their nations history in order to justify their actions.
Bharat
Yes, I agree with Darren too, that is already in place too, such as Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair both making attempts at re writing history and historical facts.
At the Hutton inquiry, When Tony Blair was charged with ” you said Saddham has weapons of mass destruction”, thus far we have not found any WMD, he changed it to:
Saddham had programmes for making WMD. So we went to war because saddham was thinking about it!!!!, just like I am thinking about how they made that Anthrax, I ought to be locked up and hung.
I thought Tony is a Benchod Lawyer and I lost all faith in him and his Governemt, so much so that to this day I recall that incident, rewriting of history is very much on par with dictators and is common in our society, be it with family, friends, politicians and work.