Could dictatorship be better than freedom?

It is an accepted paradigm that dictatorship is bad and that human freedom is what the whole world should strive for.  Based on this paradigm, there are a lot of people who are very active in fighting various conspiration theories, who fight the so called new world order, who point out that the big corporations, governments and various financial groups are enslaving the society.  It is based on these paradigms that people are protesting against China, Russia and some Middle East or African countries and regimes.

I would like to state few arguments to point out that it is very well possible that in a lot of cases human freedom can actually make the society less productive and happy than in a dictatorship.

As a father, I always asked myself a question.  Should I force my son to do something, e.g. practice playing a musical instrument, something that I consider to be good for him or should I give him a freedom to choose what he wants to do with his time.

When he was about 5 I think, I forced him, and I mean really forced him to learn to type with all his ten fingers.  It was a big struggle.  Everyday I had to yell at him to do the exercises.  Everyday he cried.  After three months, he was able to type with all ten fingers and since then I heard many times from him that he is very happy I pushed him.

Going back to adults and today’s society, where we consider freedom to be one of the main human rights, I have to say that I feel that most people are still little kids.  Little kids who are absolutely NOT ready for freedom.  Little kids who actually need adults (dictators) to force them into their own success.

Now I of course understand that the problem with dictators is that most of them are just nuts, and for a dictatorship to work the dictator has to be really smart.  Here are some examples that show how people can not handle their freedom at all.

• Even though people have freedom to exercise, they don’t
• Even though people have freedom to learn foreign languages, they don’t

Like wise, here are points that when forced to do would really help most of the people.

• Don’t watch TV more than e.g. 2 evenings per week – waste of time
• Don’t borrow more than you make

These are just small examples, but the main point is this.  In order for a society to benefit from freedom, the society itself has to be on a certain level of development intellectually.  If not, than this society will work much better under a dictatorship. 

The key question here is how can you tell if the society is at a level when it is ready for freedom?

I don’t know, but I can safely say that the Arabic countries where freedom was forced, the societies were not ready for it.  In fact, I feel that what we call the Western world is not ready for freedom also. 

So the next two questions to ask are how do you define person who is ready for freedom and what the ratio of freedom-ready people vs. the others must be for it to work.

Freedom ready person is a person that understands that they have to take care of themselves in life.  Since they realize this, they know that they have to position themselves in life so they can take care of themselves the best.  They constantly think about what they are doing and ask themselves is this helping me in life or not?  They also understand that leisure activities are a must in life, because you must relax, but they constantly keep watching that their leisure part of life is not getting out of proportion.

Person who is not ready for freedom is a person who constantly expects that someone will help them with their problems, person that never realizes that the main reason why they are where they are is mainly because of their own actions.

And here comes the big problem.  For example, the Czech Republic.  We do have freedom, but I think about 90% of people are not ready for it.

Because, as we wrote above, freedom is not only about the freedom of speech, it’s about taking responsibility of your life.  And since in the Czech Republic most people are not capable to take care of their life they need dictatorship.  The saddest story is that most of the Western societies are like that.  It seems that they want to have the freedom, but without the responsibility.  (reminds me of our Right vs. Duty blog post).

And because the Western societies are not able have freedom with responsibility, people make very stupid decisions and that is why the government has to come and rescue them.

Bitter example is the mortgage crisis in the States.,

That is why I think we, as the Western civilization, are not ready for freedom.  We need to educate ourselves way more.  Until then, we would be better under dictatorship.

And to prove my case, the biggest growth and happiness Czechs experienced was most likely during the era of Charles the fourth.