The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
Tue, 14 Jan 2025
What can a country do to shake its pesky dictator problem? How Tyrants Fall author Marcel Dirsus is here to explain why it's difficult but not impossible! What We Discuss with Dr. Marcel Dirsus: Dictators are trapped on what Dr. Marcel Dirsus calls "the dictator's treadmill" — they can't safely step down because they've committed too many crimes to retire peacefully, but must keep running to survive. Statistics show 69% of dictators end up imprisoned, exiled, or killed. Dictators weaken their own militaries through "coup-proofing" — creating multiple competing security forces and promoting based on loyalty rather than competence. While this helps prevent coups, it makes their forces less effective against external threats. Natural resources like oil and diamonds help dictators maintain power because they can generate wealth without requiring an educated population or competent administrators. This allows them to focus on loyalty over capability in their government. Most dictators who fall (about 80%) are replaced by new dictators rather than democracies. Simply removing a dictator often leads to civil war or another authoritarian regime rather than democratic reform. There are effective, peaceful ways to gradually weaken dictatorships and empower democracy, such as supporting independent journalism, providing communication networks, and training civil society groups. These methods have historically helped create positive change without the catastrophic risks of violent intervention. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1103 And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally! This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom! Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: What can countries do to shake off dictators?
That's, you know, sort of a different thing. They ban haircuts. They kill people with anti-aircraft cannons. They ban hot dogs. A lot of that stuff might not even be true. Who knows what is in the mind of a dictator? But it's not just their crazy. It's their violence. It's their evil, really, that keeps them at the top of the game. But it's a precarious position to be in.
We're going to talk about how dictators fall today on this episode. And here we go with Dr. Marcel Durzis. Let's talk about dictators, shall we? Sure. First of all, thank you for joining me. I appreciate your forthcoming expertise here. Yeah, thank you very much for having me. I've always been fascinated by dictators.
Your pitch was something like, I wrote a book about dictators, and I was like, I don't need to read the rest of this. I'm sold. Because they're just so weird. Dictators are just almost universally weird as hell. And I want to know... What's up with that? You got Gaddafi, right? He had all this plastic surgery. He looked like an old Persian woman from L.A. by the time he'd gone out.
He had all female bodyguards that ride on horses. He seemed legitimately mentally ill, talks for hours at the U.N. about nothing slash himself, was a terrorist domestically, a terrorist abroad, seemingly just didn't even realize how much his own people hate him. And then you got Kim Jong-un and Kim Jong-il, who bought like a million dollars a year in Hennessy. Crazy North Korea stuff.
We've done entire episodes on this. You can search the site for it. And then Turkmenistan, which we'll get to later. The dude renames the months after himself, and his mother tells all the women to rip their gold teeth out, builds an ice palace in the desert. Why are all these guys seemingly just totally off their rocker, out of their tree, and yet they're in charge of an entire country?
How does this happen?
That's a good question. And it's one I have actually also asked myself. I think there's probably two elements to that. The first one is a lot of these people are deeply weird. So even at the moment where they take power, they are already extremely damaged. So if you take somebody like Kim Jong-un, generals were saluting him when he was a child. He started carrying a gun when he was a child.
He could summon people to the palace when he had an issue with his toys, right? And like engineers would be forced to come during the middle of the night. So obviously that type of environment is not conducive to a healthy mind. And then the other problem is not only are these people deeply weird, but they have all this power.
And when you look at dictators, you can clearly see that it's not a good idea to give one person, in most cases one man, this much power because they're going to act on their weirdest ideas and things are going to go tragically wrong and things are going to get very weird.
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Chapter 2: Why do dictators struggle to step down?
At some point, these guys have to also realize, huh, I did kill the last few people that told me something I didn't like. Maybe I'm getting bad information, but it just doesn't seem to occur to them, or are they just stuck and they can't get off that treadmill, like you said?
Yeah, I think Putin is a really interesting case. I talked to a lot of Russia experts while writing this, right? And what some of them argued is that essentially as Putin came in, he would listen to a lot of people that were technocrats. So these might have been people that previously ran a bank or they were like managers. They cared a lot about the economy. They wanted things to work, right?
If only because they wanted to make sure that the people who were at the top got more money. But as time went on, Putin started listening more and more to people that were more like him, intelligence officers in particular, but also people from the military. And obviously, these people have a certain mindset, right?
I mean, if you spent three decades in the KGB and you constantly see threats lurking everywhere, you have a certain way of looking at the world and you transfer that to the people that you're advising, in a sense. When he was making decisions, for example, with regard to Ukraine... These were the people that he was listening to. And they were telling him, no luck. The Americans are aggressive.
They're encroaching on our territory. We have to do something now. And then he would. And over time, he would become more and more belligerent. And then there would be a Western reaction. And then that Western reaction would seemingly confirm what the hawks from the intelligence service had been telling him. So they got even more powerful. So gradually you just detach. I see.
What are those people called again? Like Siloviki or something? You know what I'm talking about?
Yeah, Siloviki. Yeah.
So men at arms almost. The intelligence services, basically, right? The people sort of working in the shadows.
You're right. 30 years in the KGB probably trains you to just be uber paranoid. Whereas like the oligarchs since the 90s Russia, they were like, how do we just make a ton of money and then get it out to the Cayman Islands, which is also not good for people, which set up the whole sort of stage for Putin to take power in the first place. Okay. Dictators are on the hamster wheel or the treadmill.
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