The real hell of this is that for all these guys aspire to be Immortan Joe, none of them actually understand how autocracy works, especially in small groups.
Autocracy can function fine as a method of societal organization, for a given value of fine; it has a track record thousands of years long. But it’s never, ever simply been a system of “I am in charge, you will do as I say because I am in charge.” Because people quite justifiably start asking “Really? Why?”
Generally speaking, you need some kind of unifying ideology and social compact that people can believe in to support you, the autocrat. Modern totalitarian or oligarchic states do this either through pure political indoctrination combined with repressive state institutions (North Korea, the PRC) sometimes with a dose of religiousity to make that medicine go down smoother (the Islamic Republic of Iran). You can also have klepto-states where powerful actors buy in to the autocrats oligarchy with a promise of maintaining their riches and power (Russia).
Every single one of those examples involves the autocracy going to at least some effort to sell itself. It isn’t just a naked assertion of power, it’s an attempt to build a social compact. All of those states at least ATTEMPT to present the people whose necks it has its boots on with a vision to buy into.
Kings, the ur-model of autocracy, usually justified their rule on the grounds of “I am a badass warrior-aristocrat victorious in war (or descendant of same) anointed by god/gods to rule. I offer protection, riches, and rewards to my loyal followers, and death to those who oppose me.”
You see that bolded part right there? That has a lot of names. The one most people recognize is noblesse oblige. The one I like most is “ring-giving.”
Kings had a social contract. It was honored in the breach a lot and usually only successfully invoked by those higher up the food chain, but the deal a king offered you, the peasant toiling in his fields and giving him half your food, was that he and his bros with swords would stop some other king and that kings bros with swords from killing you and taking ALL your food.
Please note that “bros with swords” part. Successful autocrats would have a lot of bros with swords they kept happy in a lot of ways, with favor and choice plunder and access to power and whatnot. This would be dressed up with a lot of ritual and whatnot.
I’m presenting this in highly instrumentalist terms, but the people within these autocratic systems did not and do not see it this way. A powerful warrior-aristocrat would actually believe he was serving his autocratic master as god, honor, family, and tradition demanded he do so, and that he would be rewarded for this. Similarly, an apparatchik in the PRC may actually be a Chinese patriot full of nationalist pride, ready to labor hard for the glory of his nation and people. (It’s a little more complicated in degraded kleptostates like Russia, but we can put a pin that.) Neither person things in terms of “oh, I’m being bought off in a system of power and patronage designed to make me die, and kill, to keep the man on top in power.” Some do! (That’s the kind of political awakening that leads to revolutions!) But most do not.
In cruder, smaller terms... Immortan Joe keeps the War Boys in line with the notion that they’re all his beloved sons, and by giving them shiny new toys on the regular, and “witnessing” their glory.
And your modern billionaire douchebag understands none of this. None of it. At all! And doesn’t care to learn.
The reason these guys can’t fathom a way to keep their security forces in line is because they’re locked into a pure capitalist mindset of “well, these guys are employees, they’ll take what I chose to pay them and like it” combined with “this is MY money and power, MINE, no share, MINE, I earned it me! Me mine me!”
A big reason for this, in my view, is because these guys have outsourced all of their “keep the proles from murdering me” responsibility to the nation-state. People loathe billionaires, but they tend to believe in their nation-state, because their nation-state goes to a shit-ton of effort to legitimize itself and get people to do that. Thus, to protect their ill-gotten loot, they turn to the states monopoly on violence, and also the states extractive and enforcement power. This is an extremely good deal for them, frankly, which makes it ironic that so many of them are libertarians who treat the state with contempt; their fortunes and the power necessary to protect those fortunes are ensured by MAMMOTH outlays of robust state power, without which they’d be forced to... build their own support systems.
Which they don’t know how to do. Which leads them to a conference room somewhere trying to LEARN how to do it.
The suggestion “treat the security forces like your family” is a good one. Any pre-modern aristocrat would have an instinctive knowledge inculcated into him socially as to how that works. You give them rings, torcs, jewels, weapons, land, slaves. You embrace them and call them brother. You make them understand that YOUR glory is THEIR glory. You give your daughter in marriage to one of them to establish a close family tie, and you treat THEIR daughters and wives (this is almost always a huge patriarchal model) with respect and deference.
This is all textbook. There are enormous tomes describing how this works any one of these douchebros could easily read. But they reject it all because it involves spending money, and even in a world where money isn’t a thing anymore they have this visceral revulsion towards sharing the wealth. They look at their security forces and instead of thinking “how can I make myself their beloved General, their leader for whom they’d kill and die for glory,” they think “maybe shock collars.” Because that notion is less offensive to them than “open your vault and give them cool shit, with the promise of more cool shit to come, and learn enough about politics to build them into a force with you at its head.”
