The Unusual Connection Between Optimism and Dictatorships

Lauren Reiff
3 min readAug 4, 2019

At first glance, the idea that dictatorships and optimism go possibly go hand in hand seems a jarring idea. Isn’t totalitarian control dark and gloomy and iron-fisted? Well, yes. But such systems are based on the premise that utopia looms on the horizon — a paradise of efficiency and purity and cooperative comradeship (or whatever particular ideal that dictatorship favors)!

Lauren Reiff

Writer of economics, psychology, and lots in between. laurennreiff@gmail.com / I moved! Find me here: laurenreiff.substack.com