Why Tyrants Kill

Empathy is misunderstood

Empathy is not some kind of a luxury that benevolent fools extend on others

Empathy is a key, instrumental quality for understanding other people, their actions and, therefore, reality formed by these actions

Empathy is how you understand what is happening and why

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Hell is other people. Other people are dumb, their actions are meaningless, their behaviour is irrational. What they do makes absolutely no sense.

Everything they do is totally & irredeemably incomprehensible.

Now that is until you did not walk in their moccasins for a moon, or two

Well, you do not have to walk in their moccasins physically. You cannot just become them, in a literal sense. What you can do, is put yourselves on their place & imagine you are them. Once you start feeling the pressures and incentives driving them, you will be able to plausibly reconstruct their concerns and considerations. At this point, their actions will make way more sense, and you will start seeing the logic behind them.

In other words:

You will understand their actions, once you grasped the system of incentives driving them

Incomprehensible, meaningless = you do not understand what is driving them and why

And that is because you just never bothered to put yourself onto their place

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Let me give you an example

There is hardly any other trope of tyranny more common (& commonpace-ish) than the “meaningless violence” that a “paranoid” tyrant unleashes on the populace, for no other reason than his insanity.

Nothing can be further from truth.

In fact, massive, systematic & seemingly insane violence is not only a perfectly sensible, but the only possible course of action for a rational tyrant, interested in his own survival.

That is very easy to demonstrate empirically

Which rulers in Russian history have been best known for the mass, “crazy” and “paranoid” violence, involving a never ending crusade against imaginary & made up conspiracies?

Well, I guess it would be these three

Ivan the Terrible, Joseph Stalin, Peter the Great

Now what would these three have in common?

The most obvious pattern would be:

They ruled Russia the longest, longer than anyone

Although specific dating of their rule can be arbitrary, both three exercised their personal rule over the country for approximately three decades¹. That is very & very long. That is longer than anyone.

So, an empirically observed pattern would be:

Crazy paranoid violence → Long & successful reign

Nobody rules as long, and as successfully as the seemingly insane, rabid purgers.

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Now what if our initial assumption about craziness of violence is false? What about the qualities that we characterise as crazy & irrational are actually perfectly sensible, not to say necessary for a tyrant’s survival?

Let me give you an example. Let’s see what happens with nice, gentle, non-paranoid rulers.