Why we need to clone Lee Kuan Yew 200 times

The power of benign tyranny

I've long been a single-issue voter, and that issue is "we should clone LKY ~200 times and install him as dictator-for-life in every country in the world."

He's the only proven benign tyrant / philosopher-king with an amazing and verifiable track record, a history of tackling ALL the hard problems nations face pretty well, and accessible DNA - so time for some radical experimentation in governance!

Why is this my policy?

Because democracy sucks

I mean, look at America!

Your choices for President are always 90-year old rich creep number 1, or 88 year old rich creep #2.

The entirety of congress are a bunch of shambling half-corpse 70+ year old multi-millionaires too, who probably haven’t shopped for groceries or bought gas for themselves for decades, and whose understanding of the modern world literally consists of the internet “not being a truck,” but instead a “series of tubes.”

These are the people you think are equipped to handle any of our problems at all, much less well? These are literally the people that are, right now, making all the important decisions about how smarter-than-human artificial minds are going to affect our country and the entire world, and who we to go to war with and when, and which policies and regulations and incentives are literally going to create the future for all of us. If this doesn’t horrify you, I don’t know what would.

Well I for one, am certainly glad that our representatives are so on top of it and representative of good decision making potential!

That’s just the tip of the iceberg

And then you look further down and see the voters! They’re the entire reason we have nothing but clueless, shambling half-corpses “leading” us!

More than a hundred years ago, Walter Lippmann (the guy who came up with the concept of “manufacturing consent”) asked the simple question:

“The environment is complex. Man’s political capacity is simple. Can a bridge be built between them?”

The answer is “No,” incidentally. Surprising nobody.

He argued compellingly that the world of 1922 was too vast, complex, and inaccessible for ordinary citizens to acquire the political knowledge that democracy demands. Other intellectuals of the time called it “the most effective indictment of democracy as currently conceived ever penned.”

Let me ask you, is the world more complex now than in 1922?

Are the voters less, or more informed than then? Are the stakes higher, or lower? Hmm. This doesn’t seem ideal, does it?

Why did we want these people putting their particular shambling half-corpses into office again?

It’s all a shell game

Literal billions of dollars worth of time, brainpower, media seconds / inches, and campaigns are spent over who will “win” elections. The right, or the left? Shambling corpse #1, or shambling corpse #2?? This is of paramount importance!!

But it isn’t.

Will either side actually do anything about any of our real problems? Regulatory capture, terrible K-12 schools that cost more than everywhere else and underperform for smart and dumb kids alike, declines in high human capital fertility, housing being impossible to build anywhere people actually live, the most expensive health care system in the world, increasing polarization, more commons being burned (figuratively and literally), increasing lack of trust in our institutions and legal system?

On that last point - do you know that Biden issued 2.5 kilopardons as he exited office? That according to Wikipedia he issued more than 8k pardons overall, when the total before him across ALL presidents was cumulatively ~38k pardons? That Trump has done 1.5 kilopardons just in his first month? This is very strong evidence that even our own presidents have essentially zero faith in our judiciary and legal system. Are ANY of these problems up for being solved, or even marginally improved? Are they even being talked about by any high-level politicians?

Nope.

It’s all showboating about completely marginal supposedly important “divisive” things like transgender bathrooms, gay marriage, tariffs, or gun control. Every single one of these showcase left / right issues, even if you care deeply about them, is hundreds of times less important than any of those previous real issues, which will never be addressed by either side.

It’s a pretty good bet regardless of which side gets into power, our list of real problems will get worse.

This isn’t just an indictment of both sides of the aisle, it’s an endictment of democracy OVERALL.

But isn’t the alternative mountains of skulls?

Yeah, yeah, “democracy is terrible but better than all the rest we’ve tried.” I know the quote.

The quote is wrong, full stop. It is NOT better than everything else we’ve tried, because “benign tyranny” empirically works about a thousand times better, as long as you have the right tyrant.

How about France under Louis XIV, the Sun King? Under his benign and autocratic leadership, France became the dominant European power in population (twice as big as England or Spain), economics (took state revenues from ~32M livres to ~118M), military (from 50k to 400k), and cultural influence (Moliere, Racine, Descartes, Pascal, Fermat).

Or Augustus Caesar, the first Roman Emperor, under which Rome saw noticeable prosperity and growth on multiple fronts. In his reign, Rome became the first city in the world to hit ~1M inhabitants, 80k km of paved roads were built, the military went from ~50k to ~300k, trade networks that spanned the world brought goods from as far off as China and Africa, the 200 years of peace and prosperity of the Pax Romana began under his reign, buildings and temples were upgraded so broadly it’s said that Augustus “found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble,” and much more. If you admire anything about Roman history or state capacity, you’re generally admiring the Roman Empire era with benign tyrants at the top leading things.

One more - how about the Medici’s autocratic rule of Florence? From a sleepy city-state whose main economic output was textiles, to a banking and financial powerhouse with interests everywhere, and culturally from backwater to the literal epicenter of the Renaissance. Brunneleschi, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Leonardo - all the ninja turtles (and their cognominal antecessors) owe their existence to Florence and the benign tyranny of the Medici, as indeed does the world owe them for every piece of Renaissance art we know and appreciate today, and the subsequent flourishing of art and technology worldwide that was birthed there.

Of course, as impressive as these feats are, none of these benign tyrants led their states in modern times, with the problems that we face today. If only we had a benign tyrant and philosopher king that HAD successfully tackled all those problems…

And on that front, good news, everybody!

We already know who that is - that person is Lee Kuan Yew.

The eternal LKY

Alright, alright - why are you nerds so obsessed with this guy? What did he even DO, I’ve never heard of him!

Singapore started on “hard mode”

Lee Kuan Yew took over Singapore when Britain gave it up and Malaysia decided it didn’t want it and kicked it out. I think many people don’t appreciate the difficulty of what he eventually accomplished.

He started with a country with zero natural resources, with a poor and uneducated populace, a population that was ethnically, religiously, economically, and linguistically divided AND on the edge of riots, with no military or police force, and that was entirely dependent on nearby Malaysia for things as basic as water.

He started with a country with all these issues, that was poorer overall than the Philippines, and within a single lifetime brought it up to fully developed, First World status, the richest country in SE Asia by far, with the least corrupt government in all of Asia (currently #3, generally top 5 in the “corruption index” across the entire world). It is currently between 2 - 80x more prosperous on a per-capita basis than literally every other country in SE Asia (and #2 is Brunei, a petrostate, with half the per-capita GDP, Singapore is more than 6x higher than number 3, and more than 80x higher than #10).

The degree of this accomplishment is simply mind blowing - it’s the single biggest accomplishment in governance, economic growth, and institution building that the world has ever witnessed, in a data-rich and verifiable way.

Along the way, he successfully tackled essentially every “hard” problem that most countries consider difficult, including:

• Race riots and ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversity

• Navigating relationships with larger and more economically and militarily powerful neighbors

• Addressing severe housing shortages and slum conditions

• Building actually affordable housing

• Dismantling entrenched corruption in government institutions and rebuilding the government and civil service into the least corrupt government in all of Asia

• Building a meritocratic civil service that attracts actually talented people into working for the government

• Managing tensions between Chinese, Malay, Tamil, and Indian populations

• Creating policies for integration and preventing ethnic enclaves and underclasses while respecting cultural differences

• Creating jobs and attracting foreign investment when Singapore had no natural resources

• Building an export-oriented economy in a region where import substitution was the norm

• Developing financial services and technology sectors from scratch

• Transforming an undereducated population into a skilled workforce, while aligning education with economic needs and future industries

• Building a military and anti-terrorism intelligence apparatus from scratch

• Maintaining neutrality and good international relations during the Cold War

• Mitigating pollution and creating a "garden city" with extensive urban greenery

You know how LKY solved all these problems successfully? With pragmatism, long-term thinking, and a willingness to make difficult trade-offs rather than pursuing short-term and / or populist solutions, which he believed distinguished Singapore's development from many other post-colonial states.

If you’re interested in more LKY / Singapore specifics, I highly recommend his book From Third World to First, which is explicitly about Singapore’s journey and how he solved all those problems. If you’d rather read a summary, here’s a detailed review I read and enjoyed:

Book Review: From Third World to First, by Lee Kuan Yew

This isn’t possible in democracies

You can pretty much only do that in a benign tyranny. If you’re thrown out on your ear every 4 years, you can’t do anything that takes more than a couple of years to bear fruit, AND you have to spend most of that time fundraising or campaigning. Long term thinking and pragmatics are the reserve of people who don’t have to answer to the median voter. They’re also the reserve of leaders that don’t spend the majority of their time fundraising, strategizing, and campaigning to be re-elected, but instead spend their time and bandwidth actually solving problems.

How well are the democracies of the world doing on any of those “difficult problem” fronts? Terribly? Man, who would have guessed…oh, right - anyone who’s paid any attention whatsoever in the last 2-4 decades.

Because who IS the median voter, in America? They’re actually not the ones doomscrolling Facebook and Twitter for hours per day, because that’s several levels of “caring” and “investment” higher than the median. They’re the ones eating nuggets in the check out lane at Walmart, the 80 year old NIMBY that rules the local HOA with an iron fist, the ones keeping Jerry Springer on the air for 30 years, the ones exclusively absorbing their opinions from increasingly hyper-polarized media channels, the ones who have stronger opinions the less they understand both the issue and the other side’s views on that issue.

Those views and opinions are filtered through to politicians who are literally specialized for being the best at lying, pretending to or actually being populist, and spending the maximum time fundraising and campaigning, because that’s what achieves high office in the competitive domain of “democratic electoral politics without campaign spending limits.”

And THAT’S who you want to be deciding everything, versus an actually smart, commited-to-the-long-term decision maker spending their time on actually solving problems??

Leadership quality matters more than anything else

I know right about now you’re probably jumping up and down and pointing at Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and other authoritarian states that suck and AREN’T solving those problems well.

Sure! The reason “tyranny” sucks is that it’s high variance - occasionally you roll a natural 20 and get a Lee Kuan Yew that solves every problem and speed runs centuries of development in a single generation. But you’re more likely to roll a “Stalin” or “Kim Jong Un,” or “Idi Amin” and crush your populace under a boot of oppression and malevolence for decades, and do worse at ALL of those things.

Leadership quality matters, 100%. Institutions like democracy used to matter, because they could ensure that your leadership quality doesn’t go so strongly negative that it causes megadeaths, a revolution, or an eternal-boot-on-face.

But the essential bargain democracy offers is something like “in return for making sure the worst leader you can get is floored at -20 instead of -100, we will cap the best that a possible leader can be at +30.” It’s a restriction of range.

But wouldn’t it be better to be able to get leaders of higher quality?

Isn’t it plausible that as our societies and economies have expanded and gotten more complex, we NEED leaders of higher quality to actually make progress on any of the genuinely difficult problems we face today?

Send in the clones

This is exactly why we need cloning, and an exclusively LKY-focused governance framework. Modern technology has rendered those problems and risks obsolete!

I don’t think we realize what a big deal this is - for the first time in history we actually have a proven, successful, verified philosopher king, who we KNOW can solve all the actual problems, and who we can produce at scale with modern technology.

No longer will Stalins usurp Lenins! LKY’s will raise and train their own clones, so that their work can carry forward into future generations!

A country overthrows their LKY for a local strongman? One of the LKY’s gets exposed to some weird toxin or drug or ideology while growing up and goes off the rails? Not on multiple-LKY’s watch! All the other ~199 countries of the world can coordinate, depose the bad guy, and install another LKY, for the good of that nation and everyone else, and they can do that to ANY nation that steps out of line.

We will have an unprecedented degree of national alignment and coordination when every single country is run by the same proven philosopher king. We’ll also have an unprecedented run of economic and technological growth, low crime, low corruption, abundant housing, and smarter policies about literally everything.

Common objections

Nobody can handle that amount of power? LKY did it, empirically, in hard mode, for 30 years, AND created one of the least corrupt, most prosperous, and most meritocratic governments in the world.

We don’t know if his skills will generalize outside of that time and place? Completely fair. But we know he did roughly 100x better than any “democratic” politician and set of institutions in history, and we’re currently failing on basically every important political front today, in an environment where that failure is mattering more because the stakes are getting higher.

Sure, he’s not guaranteed to perform at his usual 10x-FDR level in every country and set of environments. But he’s pretty much guaranteed to be a better choice than the current steaming piles of failure and self-serving on offer in every country today.

And he’s not going to be running the world as a singleton, he’s going to be running it distributed across ~200 countries with different resources, priorities, and peoples, and doing a better job doing it than literally anyone else.

It’s a global problem

I’ve spent this whole time pointing out how bad America is, but just think of Russia, or Africa, or North Korea, or the rest of SE Asia - endless monuments to suffering and waste and bad governance!

The amount of human capital entirely wasted, the amount of human suffering being mercilessly squeezed out of billions of people every day just because of some attachment to non-clone governance; all of it strictly unnecessary!

After all, it would be hard to do WORSE than most “governance” today!

Your vote is literally worthless today. No election is won by a single vote. Even if you use it, it can’t be used to actually solve any of the real problems we have, because that’s never even an option. The entire system is tuned to surface and put the worst people into power, because of basic game theoretical dynamics and because nobody good would participate in such a broken system. And it’s all getting worse! After all, the smart set at Manifold is currently betting on a ~14% chance of a “real” 2028 election not happening AT ALL.

So join me, brothers and sisters, in creating a better future!

Stop the madness, stop the waste, stop the suffering - if we believe in ourselves, we can all work together and clone LKY ~200 times and get the philosopher king and better governance we all need!