I don’t know why people like Trump think dictators are strong. It takes much more strength, intelligence and talent to lead a democracy than it does to be a dictator. Kim Jong-un was given his position, he didn’t earn it. And the fact that he needed to kill family members to keep it does not speak well of his leadership skills.
Excellent post! I think it's in large part a consequence of the often ignored, but quite obvious truth, that the most obvious things are often the most likely thinks to escape people's attention precisely because they are the most obvious. In other words, we too often think truths must appear difficult to see to us.
Beyond that, dictatorships necessarily propagandize their people's with nonsense such as "Under our system, we at last made the trains run on time", These things invariably turn out false under examination, but they are repeated so frequently and so loudly that they spill over into "neighboring" democracies and even become truisms there.
Also most people have little or no supervisor experience but more or less tend to think the military is the gold standard for leadership and organization. I mean, who is not broadly aware of how the military does it? The different major militaries in the world are overall arguably effective at managing things when compared to the challenges they are up against. Yet few people stop to question the obvious : Is a "machine" designed to grind other machines to pieces while being ground to pieces itself a good model for optimally organizing people to achieve goals like revenue growth, cost reduction, productivity gain, etc in a radically different environment than a military environment? For instance, does a civilian organization really need such firmly disciplined "troops" it can even take large numbers of casualties and still function? Or perhaps would a less ridged, less hierarchical, organization be more likely to boost people's moral, allowing them to be more easily inspired to perform their jobs, and consequently lead to gains in productivity?
I ran my business more along the lines of the latter than the former way, and my people measurably outperformed what I could discover of similar organization's performance's, especially in standard measures of productivity.
