Authoritarian Regimes

People think that authoritarian regimes are based on ideas. That's not true. Authoritarian regimes are based on group based paranoia; who's is in, who's out, who's on the bus who isn't. It doesn't matter where the bus is going (usually 'to hell'). And it doesn't matter if you are a rock band or a political party, the principle of closed rather than openness is what sustains the regime.
Meanwhile, when you are on the outside of a regime, life can get very uncomfortable, so you might create your own counter regime. Both are probably as bad as each other.
Perhaps as a consequence, authoritarian regimes can base themselves on very stupid ideas (so the quality of idea hardly matters) but that is not the core mechanism for the authoritarian regime to work. The core mechanism is the implementation of power.
The enemy can be, often is, invisible. To the Nazi, the threat wasn't an actual Jewish person of a particular consciousness, but a notional section of the population to be blamed. Blaming people (but not real people) when things get tough is happening quite a lot these days; there is the notion that if we excluded certain people, things would be better - when actually, they would be incomparably worse.
There was a handy saying that anybody who wanted to run an institution should never be allowed to do so. Oscar Wilde famously declared 'I won't belong to a club that accepts me as a member'. Such a view is, I suspect, correct, and all clubs, presently, are fending off, and part of, the overwhelming opportunity that 'freedom to know' might provide; that the internet might have provided if it hadn't been co-opted in to the service of consumerism and surveillance; a tragedy that could have been foreseen, should be fought against, and may yet be undone. The phenomenon is now totally evident in our universities, where professors are not there for what they might profess, but to 'manage'; or rather to stabilise, or prop up, a system that is (potentially) wildly anachronistic.
At last night's 'Free Range' (A collection of the country's photographic schools, all doing their end of year thing on Brick Lane, East London) the overwhelming sense was one of exhaustion; that there was nowhere for photography to go anymore. The pieces above, by Jake Gill, were neat, really neat, but the blub was, once more, 'mental health'. Surely people should realise this 'mental health' as a construction, and what's more a nasty consequence, of a horrible way to run the world.
We will have the same sense at every end of year architecture show. That is until there is a fundamental shift in the 'means of production'; towards joy. (Joy would seem a reasonable, all encompassing, alternative where presently there lies 'exhaustion'.)
Authoritarian regimes become stronger the more they are threatened. Today, the clubs are more threatened than ever, and they become more intense as a consequence. When the RIBA can no longer legitimately function as a passive organ of polite society, it flogs itself off as a 'brand' of deep consequence, which it isn't, and never has been; it mortgages itself to a dying system.
Stupid people join authoritarian regimes. Don't be a stupid person.