In The Devil’s Disciples, Louis Menand asks why people follow dictators:
Few puzzles in political philosophy are more daunting than the Problem of the Loyal Henchmen. The Problem of the Loyal Henchmen is a subset of the more familiar Problem of Authority. Why does authority command obedience?
The following examples figure prominently in Cialidini’s Influence (a fascinating read I breezed through last Christmas):
A man who tells you to pick your gum wrapper up off the sidewalk is generally ignored; a man in a uniform who makes the same request, even if it’s the uniform of a bus driver, is instinctively obeyed. People wearing white lab coats and carrying clipboards, with no other evidence of expertise, have succeeded in persuading subjects in psychology experiments to act in the belief that they are torturing other human beings. In these cases, people can persuade themselves that the authorities they obey are benign — that picking up litter and torturing other human beings in a laboratory are in the interests of civic order and scientific progress.
I love the concept of “Blofeldism” — what an excellent pop-culture reference:
The Problem of the Loyal Henchmen arises when people willingly obey authorities everyone knows to be evil. Why, after the villain has fled in his private submarine, and while the high-tech palace crashes and burns, does the last unincinerated member of the villain’s private militia risk his life to take a shot at James Bond? Loyalty to Blofeld? Loyalty to the principles of Blofeldism? What could that mean?
Here’s an interesting point about persuasion that rings true:
The mysterious part of totalitarianism’s appeal — and here we return to the Problem of the Loyal Henchmen — is that its official ideology can be, and usually is, absurd on its face, and known to be absurd by the leaders who preach it. [...] Totalitarian rule, Arendt argued, is predicated on the assumption that proving that a thing is true is less effective than acting as though it were true. The Nazis did not invite a discussion of the merits of anti-Semitism; they simply acted out its consequences.
An excellent point about dictators:
The surest path to the top for a would-be dictator is to assure people that their fate is being determined by strangers, by people who are, in some fundamental way, unlike themselves. Several years ago, Riccardo Orizio, an Italian journalist, began to track down former dictators who are now living in disgrace and largely forgotten, and to interview them. The result, Talk of the Devil: Encounters with Seven Dictators (Walker; $22), is fascinating.
[...]
Each ex-dictator is mad in his own way, but what almost all of them insist on, in their interviews with Orizio, is that everything they did — the torture, the starvation, the looting of the nation’s wealth, the murder of political opponents — was for the good of their country. The alternatives were chaos, colonization, or slaughter. These men and women were, in their own minds, patriots. They validate John Adams’s old warning that “power always thinks it has a great soul.” The degree of cognitive dissonance involved in being a person who oppresses people out of love for them is summed up in a poster that Baby Doc Duvalier had put up in Haiti. It read, “I should like to stand before the tribunal of history as the person who irreversibly founded democracy in Haiti.” And it was signed “Jean-Claude Duvalier, president-for-life.”