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I say with more empathy than you can know that your perspective is entirely cope for being socially maladapted. You don't know how intelligent most people are. You don't know how much empathy they actually have. You're just like a channer writing monologues online about how "normies" don't have internal monologues [citation needed!] and therefore are "NPCs". Society has hurt you and you've grown estranged from it, and in bitter loneliness you tell yourself stories of their inferiority (which, not coincidentally, implies your superiority) in order to sooth yourself. But you aren't superior and they are not the wretched creatures you have portrayed them as in their absence.

It seems to me unlikely that you will be able to outgrow this mindset without confronting it directly, which is why I am broaching the subject so directly. My access to a device to write these things is irregular, but I strongly encourage you to a) try talking to more people and b) actually read Mao.

...We must also arouse the political consciousness of the entire people so that they may willingly and gladly fight together with us for victory. We should fire the whole people with the conviction that China belongs not to the reactionaries but to the Chinese people. There is an ancient Chinese fable called "The Foolish Old Man who Removed the Mountains." It tells of an old man who lived in northern China long, long ago and was known as the Foolish Old Man of North Mountain. His house faced south and beyond his doorway stood the two great peaks, Taihang and Wangwu, obstructing the way. With great determination, he led his sons in digging up these mountains hoe in hand. Another greybeard, known as the Wise Old Man, saw them and said derisively, "How silly of you to do this! It is quite impossible for you to dig up these two huge mountains." The Foolish Old Man replied, "When I die my sons will carry on; when they die, there will be my grandsons and then their sons and grandsons, and so on to infinity. High as they are, the mountains cannot grow any higher and with every bit we dig, they will be that much lower. Why can't we clear them anyway?" Having refuted the Wise Old Man's wrong view, he went on digging every day, unshaken in his conviction. God was moved by this, and he sent down two angels, who carried the mountains away on their backs. Today, two big mountains lie like a dead weight on the Chinese people. One is imperialism, the other is feudalism. The Chinese Communist Party has long made up its mind to dig them up. We must persevere and work unceasingly, and we too, will touch God's heart. Our God is none other than the masses of the Chinese people. If they stand up and dig together with us, why can't these mountains be cleared away?"

https://afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/china_1900_mao_speeches.htm#foolish

Benevolent authoritarianism is already the promise of liberal representative democracy. IMO the true problem is that people are alienated from politics after decades of neoliberalism being the leftmost position. If people didn't feel like the entire institution of democracy was useless, I'm sure you wouldn't see that level of detachment. Hell, just compare to Cuba where democracy is much more direct and people have much more input: it directly leads to a vastly larger portion of the population participating to protect their interests and their communities' interests. Because they see their own civil participation in politics as an extension of their country's revolutionary project. In America, the national political project is so transparently aligned with the interests of industrialists and billionaires that the best they can offer people is a negative promise, that we won't do what the other scary guy is gonna do.

American political ideology is also just broken as fuck. Most people can't even maintain a coherent set of beliefs let alone consistently vote base upon whatever incoherent beliefs they may have. Works out for the ruling class of course.

A benevolent dictatorship is obviously the most effective form of government, the problem is that any dictatorship can be used for good or evil and no matter how benevolent your queen or dictator or whatever you call her is, she's gonna die eventually and now you're rolling the dice. If you get someone less benevolent, system's a failure. If you get someone just as benevolent but less competent and they get deposed, system's a failure. And that's assuming that the system even survives succession rather than devolving into old-school feudalism or capitalist 'democracy' or ancap utopia or whatever in a power vacuum.

The only way to ensure a benevolent government remains long-term is by spreading the power out enough that the system can shrug off the deaths and retirement of individuals and keep going along some plan that exists beyond any one person

Okay, you say, so don't have a dictatorship of one benevolent queen but rather of a benevolent group acting in the best interests of the people. And this has the same pros and cons, but both blunted. It's good at what it does as long as the group remains truly benevolent, but any organization can decay and become corrupt and, in a sense, die just like our hypothetical good queen.

So if we just keep following the logic down, we end up at the idea that the group responsible for the wide-ranging decisions affecting everyone's lives should ideally be accountable to, more or less, everyone. If the ultimate goal is for the government to act in the best interests of the people, it follows that it is the people who should be the best judge of how well the government is working. If it stops doing its job properly, it is the people who notice. So it should be in the hands of the people to correct it.

Incredible dedication to the Mayor Pete bit lol

I've thought this way for a while, and part of it might be our experiences are with the American public, who are not known for their grasp on politics, let alone much else.

I think this is mainly due to lack of education, propaganda, and outright brainwashing by neoliberal interests. Hopefully, once those things are no longer in the picture, people can be trusted to do what is genuinely in their long term best interests.