The algorithmic complexity of authoritarian regimes

Existence in a totalitarian society is straightforward. The attempt to equalize everyone's rights should perfectly correspond to any utopian idea of centralized and utilitarian creation of an ideal society. But such voluntarism turns into chaos in practice.

Not all dictatorships are the same, but a situation inevitably arises when the smallest substrate simple units of society - people - are in structural difficulty with the authorities due to the chaos of their inter-individual interactions. A human hive is not a "collection" of quanta. Monotony does not lead to simplicity. There are no such principles in the laws of social life.

Dictatorships create algorithmic complexity. Once again, the presence of simple, identical basic elements in the substrate of a society's system does not automatically mean simplicity in structural terms.

Why does a dictatorship, with all its centralization and almost limitless resources, fail to cope with this? Because the problem with calculating algorithmic complexity is not to describe it, but to describe such complexity requires an infinite amount of information. That is, to theoretically describe all the existing chaos at the basic level of society, one would have to calculate all (all!!!) possible connections between its elements.

The authorities cannot do this. That is why liberalism (based on the theory of information and the principle of simplicity-complexity) has a theoretical advantage over a monotonous dictatorship.

How do the elements that create chaos perceive their interactions in this case? Gossip, anecdotes, family parables, and so on are the most common way to simplify algorithmic complexity. The government is not perceived at this level at all - only about the folklore that dominates this particular society. That is why atheists in the USSR were unable to close the Orthodox Church. That is why they brought back the celebration of the New Year for the "Soviet" family. This was done to ensure that the rulers remained an element of the algorithmic complexity of the structures basic elements. This, by the way, complicated the situation even more.

An authoritarian country is always burdened with a bureaucratic apparatus and it’s mythological and mono-ideology. These three things, after gaining power in society and forming a rigid vertical of power, will surely require a symbolic confrontation with the "enemy." The best option, in this case, is to look for internal and external enemies. 

External enemies are necessarily of global and civilization importance. Internal enemies must be destroyed or eliminated in the context of the existing myth. The fight against internal enemies leads to even greater substrate simplicity in the population's attitude toward the country. Strangely enough, this complicates structural relations with the government. This is the "isolation of the government from the people".

The most interesting occasion in this context is the confrontation with external enemies. Authoritarian regimes are always looking for - and finding - such enemies. This does not depend on the civilization enemy’s geographical location. Such enemies are found on the principle of "not fitting into the dominant myth."

In search of simplifying the relationship between the structure and the substrate (the people are beginning to misunderstand the government), civilization or global enemies are found. The parameters of the search here are religion, ideology, common past, geographical confrontation (island versus mainland), and so on. These concepts help authoritarian regimes to search for their geopolitical enemies and allies. Conceptualizing confrontations with enemies leads to the internationalization of conflicts. Authoritarian authorities are looking for ways to simplify structural relations in the country. 

This simplification leads to the fact that "brotherly peoples" and "enemies" create even more algorithmic complexity. What seems clear to the people - these are "ours" and the others are "strangers" - requires even more information to process all the connections that are created at the primary substrate level. After all, enemies and allies interact with authoritarian authorities with their structures and concepts. 

Such systems interact based on relational features - based on attitude. The substrates of the systems never become common. Ethnomaterial and social relations are different. Folklore makes the difference. The coexistence of different folklore and ethnic groups complicates the interaction between the structures of "union" regimes.

What it means?

The world separation into friends and foes only complicates those interactions that are presented as simple by the authoritarian propaganda. The current war in Europe is not an imperialist war but a civilization conflict. Those conflicts have a long history, no prospects for resolution, and periodically escalate to war. Civilization wars inevitably become internationalized, as civilization related countries join them, either by participating in hostilities or, more often, by providing military and financial assistance.

It seems that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a typical war of identity. Unless there is a fundamental change in the paradigm of war perception among the allies, Ukraine will not be able to regain the lost territories, and the war will go into a low-intensity state until Russia accumulates forces for a new attack.