Isegoria

Xavier Marquez presents a simple model of cults of personality:

One of the main problems dictators face is that repression creates liars (preference falsification, in the jargon), yet it is necessary for them to remain in power. This is sometimes called the dictator’s dilemma: it is hard for dictators to gauge their true levels of support or whether or not officials below them are telling them the truth about what is going on in the country because repression gives everyone an incentive to lie, yet they need repression if they are to avoid being overthrown by people exploiting their tolerance to organize themselves. Moreover, repression is costly and works best when it is threatened rather than actually used. All things considered, then, a dictator would often prefer to minimize repression – to use it efficiently so as to minimize its distorting effects on his knowledge and on its effectiveness. He can either allow relatively free debate, and run some risk of being overthrown (this happens especially in poor dictatorships which cannot construct a reliable monitoring apparatus, as Egorov, Guriev, and Sonin show [ungated]), or he can use repression and risk being surprised by a lack of support later.

Here is where cults of personality come in handy. The dictator wants a credible signal of your support; merely staying silent and not saying anything negative won’t cut it. In order to be credible, the signal has to be costly: you have to be willing to say that the dictator is not merely ok, but a superhuman being, and you have to be willing to take some concrete actions showing your undying love for the leader. (You may have had this experience: you are served some food, and you must provide a credible signal that you like it so that the host will not be offended; merely saying that you like it will not cut it. So you will need to go for seconds and layer on the praise). Here the concrete action required of you is typically a willingness to denounce others when they fail to say the same thing, but it may also involve bizarre pilgrimages, ostentatious displays of the dictator’s image, etc. The cult of personality thus has three benefits from the point of view of the dictator (aside from stroking his vanity).

When everybody lies about how wonderful the dictator is, there is no common knowledge: you do not know how much of this “support” is genuine and how much is not, which makes it hard to organize against the dictator and exposes one to risks, sometimes enormous risks, if one so much as tries to share one’s true views, since others can signal their commitment to the dictator by denouncing you. This is true of all mechanisms that induce preference falsification, however: they prevent coordination.

What makes cults of personality interesting, however, is that the more baroque and over the top, the better (though the “over the top” level needs to be achieved by small steps), since differences in signals of commitment indicate gradations of personal support of the dictator, and hence give the dictator a reasonable measurement of his true level of support that is not easily available to the public. (Though you have to be willing to interpret these signals, and not come to actually believe them naively).

Finally, a cult of personality can in fact transform some fraction of the population into genuine supporters, which may come in handy later. In a social world where everyone appears to be convinced of godlike status of the leader, it is very hard to “live in truth” as Havel and other dissidents in communist regimes argued.

To be sure, in order for a cult of personality to work, you must start small, and you must be willing to both reward (those who denounce) and punish (those who do not praise) with sufficient predictability, which presents a problem if control is initially lacking; there must be a group committed to enforcement at the beginning, and capable of slowly increasing the threshold “signal” of support required of citizens. (So some dictators fail at this: consider, e.g., Mobutu’s failures in this respect, partly from inability to monitor what was being said about him or to punish deviations with any certainty). But once the cult of personality is in full swing, it practically runs itself, turning every person into a sycophant and basically destroying everyone’s dignity in the process. It creates an equilibrium of lies that can be hard to disrupt unless people get a credible  signal that others basically hate the dictator as much as they do and are willing to do something about that.

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