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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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I don't think there's much real danger of a dictator using technology to rule for hundreds or more years. At least, not with plausible near-term technology.

Unless the life-extension technology also gives the dictator some kind of high neuro-plasticity and/or elevated intelligence, at some point the old dictator will be outcompeted by more flexible and/or smarter rivals.

And if the dictator does use technology that elevates his mental flexibility and intelligence, it is difficult to imagine that this technology would be inaccessible to other elites around him for any long period of time.

And if all else fails, the dictator would still be as vulnerable to bullets and poison as he was before the life extension treatments.

In any case, the dictator would still be subject to the normal phenomena of politics.

In general, dictators do not rule because they are transcendently intelligent (they do tend to be extremely intelligent, but not outrageously beyond the normal human standards), and they certainly do not rule because their bodies are invulnerable to bullets and poison. They rule because they maneuver themselves into local political maxima, situations in which the political system as a whole finds it easier to continue with the dictator's rule than to maneuver away from it. I think that even Stalin would have been swiftly killed if the other Soviet elites, as a group, found it more convenient to get rid of him than to put up with him. A dictator who has made many people among the elite wish to get rid of him can only hope to survive for a few hours if powerful insiders around him start to believe that if one of them kills the dictator, they will not be killed by the dictator's loyalists and by other elites as a result.