At a superficial level, one might consider that you would want to:
- Become the Fuhrer
- Put everyone else into preventive detention, serving you as slaves
However, there are practical limits to such schemes; we saw, and continue to see, that in highly illiberal systems such as those of Stalin and Mao, that the military and economic strength of the people in areas they ruled, greatly declined. Such declines put the very existence of those regimes in jeopardy, therefore you could not consider that the leadership of these governments did not live in fear, and could not consider that they would not come to untimely ends. So the only value system under which it could be logical to pursue such a highly illiberal government, would be one in which the pure exercise of absolute power, even for a short while and with high risk, would justify all efforts.
Those individuals who do not have such a supreme thirst for power for its own sake and for no other end, would wish for other things like wealth, women, and fame. One could consider being the ordinary dictator of a country as a means to these ends, without the extreme risks of the totalitarian approach. However, such a form of government also is weak: by giving up totalitarian control, you also are giving up the fear, the mass purges, and the colossal security apparatus required to implement such control. Moreover, by amassing disproportionate wealth, secured by violence and unmoored to merit, your corruption is obvious to everyone, which will make them your natural enemies. Although the overall situation clearly is less risky than the totalitarian approach, you only would take this approach if you already were caught up in such a system, and could not back down from it.
One further could relinquish one’s supremacy over others, and instead form an elite group of slaveholders, to achieve the balance between power, wealth, women, and fame, with less fear and risk. This reduces the risk of palace intrigues, as you are by no means the only one hated by the mass of people, and there’s no single person who will be the target of plots. However, you still are subject to periodic rebellion and acts of random violence, as everyone understands the corruption of the ruling class; but your risk has been reduced. While, in the industrial era, this is a notionally feasible social arrangement, there still are some long-term drawbacks – the key one being that your people fundamentally are disloyal, and will defect given any opportunity. Therefore, militarily, you will be weak against liberal democratic governments, especially if you have any significant amount of open borders or information exchange. Moreover, the people will lack any incentive to exercise independent judgement or work harder than they have to. Historically, this lack of economic vitality in the industrial era, led to the weakening and downfall of the old kings, as well as the Soviet Union. Hence it can be a viable temporary arrangement, but not a permanent one; and this understanding among the elite will hasten the decline and revolution of the regime. In summary, if you are willing to be brutal on a regular basis, and accept that you could die at any time, you could choose this course of action.
Let us consider that your value system instead recognizes that the risk of death is a major problem, and that you primarily wish to enjoy the power, wealth, women, and fame, instead of working all the time and constantly beating and killing others. In this case, you could not expect special treatment, except in a meritocratic (non-market, see below) system where you earn all your rewards, and then you would have to work all the time. Hence, everyone must be a king, which means everyone has to be rich. This leads you directly to the meritocratic regulated free market system, which historically is the only system that can deliver long-run prosperity, property protection, and sound enough economic management for a large enough number of people to become rich, that you could become one of them. Moreover, there has to be a relatively pervasive rule of law to keep the lower classes from robbing and killing you. At the same time, the thesis we are exploring is that you consider yourself superior to everyone else, and so you would like to do the minimum amount of these things so you can enjoy the ability to take what you want with the minimum amount of work. You don’t want a fully just system of law or economy, because that doesn’t allow you to have disproportionate rewards.
How much advantage can you maintain over the lower classes? Per previous discussion, you directly cannot enslave them, which means you can’t use arbitrary murder, rape, etc. This means you require some legal rule that achieves your effect, that still provides the lower classes enough freedom and security that they have their own independent spheres of action, and can feel “safe enough”. As a first demonstration, the most obvious end of such a law is preventing (your) murder; so the means to achieve that end will be discussed.
You cannot make a general rule that makes all people slaves, but you can make “special” classes of people who have “earned” the treatment that reduces the probability of your murder. Such classes could include:
- Outspoken individuals
- Individuals prone to anger, or physical violence
- Members of social classes that engage in violence-related activity
- Mentally disabled or impaired individuals
- Poor people, in the context of a semi-meritocratic society
The risk factors must be specifically identified, and the accompanying probability of unacceptable action must be bounded. That is, the subpopulations you identify must pass some threshold of violent/uncooperative behavior in an aggregate (we all know that individuals vary greatly). That threshold cannot be close to that of the population average; otherwise you would, for example, use preventive detention on the entire population, which brings you back to the system of mass slavery.
Considering that you have the modern means of mass surveillance available to you, you know that you can distinguish subpopulations on the basis of factors such as:
- Age
- Income
- Education and merit tests
- Sex, gender, and sexual orientation
- Skin color, hair characteristic, height, weight, or other physical characteristic
- Membership and participation in various organizational activities
- Neighborhood, culture, and other social affiliations
Then, when you consider the subpopulations that you would like to evaluate for above or below threshold, you aren’t just dealing with one of these factors; you are dealing with very finely sliced portions of the population. The obvious example is women, who commit far fewer violent crimes than men; in order to qualify some women for your preventive detention, stop and frisk, etc. you will have to identify the other combinations of factors that distinguish that significantly above average subpopulation.
The most significant issue you will run into is that this segmentation establishes meritocracy and culturocracy: many indicators such as income establish average or more favorable performance vs. the thresholds of deviance. Moreover, the limited amount of reliable policing data, especially in high crime areas, under corrupt governments, etc. means you are likely to zero in on the currently disfavored populations in the current social order, instead of those who really are committing the most crimes. Hence you run into a bootstrapping problem: you must completely and promptly enforce the just law to know which subpopulations are most deviant, but complete and prompt enforcement of the just law is difficult to reverse, as it requires mass action and awareness. So, your only practical option is to discriminate against the groups who already are being discriminated against. There isn’t much gain in that, because they already are the least desirable and wealthy members of society. You have to take a very hard look at yourself and your values, and the practical realities of your specific situation, to understand whether the benefit of further kicking down the lower classes is justified by the enforcement and opportunity costs, as well as risks to the social order caused by the use of illiberal government.
A variation of the above is where you apply the same laws to everyone, but the laws just happen to be the ones you like, that establish the social order you desire; so you are imposing totalitarianism for only a select set of issues. This deviates from the just law in criminalizing behaviors with punishments that don’t correspond to their bodily or property harms. In that regard, it is arbitrary behavior; so a population that is conditioned to accept such behavior, could accept any other laws that they please. In other words, you are training the population for mob rule, instead of elite rule as you would desire; your government becomes less stable, and you personally have to maintain power and influence (including favorable popular opinion) in order to prevent others from imposing their preferred laws, even those with whom you notionally would identify in a slaveholder or class-based society. You therefore could consider yourself secure for a period of time, but as with the dictator or slaveholder-based society, you know that your hold on power is unstable and fragile, requiring continued effort to maintain. The question relating to your value system is whether the cost of that maintenance effort is less than the benefit of those laws. You already know you are wasting money and lives by implementing the suboptimal policies, so the question mostly is aesthetic: do you want to force everyone to pay for your church, so you get bigger buildings and congregations than you would otherwise? You so hate seeing dark skinned people that you will pay and have people die to get them out of your sight? And you would risk mob rule to achieve those objectives? You should think through what you truly value before you embark on a project of arbitrary legislation.