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Q&A Creating an incompetent antagonist

Well, remember, many totalitarian regimes are in fact woefully inefficient. Largely because the emperor/fuhrer/first citizen needs to make sure the people beneath him are either not ambitious enoug...

posted 5y ago by Matthew Dave‭  ·  last activity 4y ago by System‭

Answer
#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T10:13:57Z (over 4 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/40289
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by user avatar Matthew Dave‭ · 2019-12-08T10:13:57Z (over 4 years ago)
Well, remember, many totalitarian regimes are in fact woefully inefficient. Largely because the emperor/fuhrer/first citizen needs to make sure the people beneath him are either not ambitious enough or competent enough to potentially overthrow them. The emperor has to be a paranoid backstabber to maintain a totalitarian regime, and he thus assumes everyone else is a paranoid backstabber. Hence members of his cabinet are constantly rotating, no united vision can get done, the empire needs multiple spy organisations that are all spying on each other and murdering each other, et cetera, et cetera.

Basically, an incompetent totalitarian regime shouldn't be hard to write; real-life totalitarian regimes tend to be woefully incompetent as is.

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2018-11-21T16:32:54Z (over 5 years ago)
Original score: 16