• Salamendacious@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    33
    ·
    1 year ago

    It’s kind of crazy that pretty much every assumption Putin had about invading Ukraine turned out to be wrong.

    • chaogomu@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      40
      ·
      1 year ago

      It’s the dictator trap.

      See, they live in a distorted reality, because advisors who don’t tell them what they want to hear, are often no longer their advisors. Sometimes they simply no longer are.

      The second part of the dictator trap is loyalty. Fear does not engender loyalty. Fear leads to greed. So with people actively lying to the dictator, they see it as given that they will skim a little off the top for themselves. For any unexpected retirements that they have.

      The dictator knows that his people are crooked, but he also knows that he would not be the dictator without them. So he trusts that he has eyes on everything, but then he cannot actually trust his advisors to tell him the truth, because of part one of the dictator trap.

      And this cycle just feeds back into itself endlessly.