Leaders Believe Their Own Ideology Less Than the Public Does

Harari argues that in ideological autocracies the leadership inevitably comes to believe the ideology — that they are not simply lying to the public but have persuaded themselves along with everyone else.

I think this is false, and the argument against it is available from ordinary evidence.

First: Belief Is Not Binary

Before anything else, the framing needs fixing.

As with religion, people can half-believe, or believe at seventy per cent, or believe on Tuesdays. They behave as though they believe in some contexts and not others, and mostly they do not examine the question at all.

Debates about belief assume it is on or off, because that makes the question tractable. It is not, and the assumption distorts everything downstream. A leader who "believes the ideology" may hold it the way most people hold their religion: as a background commitment that structures public behaviour without ever being tested.

Second: Some of Them Said So

The direct evidence is that leaders have stated outright that they did not believe what they were selling, or that they held a more sophisticated version and distributed a simplified one to the public.

That second admission is more common and more interesting. It concedes the essential point: there is a version for us and a version for them, and the leadership knows which is which. That alone contradicts the claim that leaders and public share the same ideology.

Third: Look at the Citizens

This is the argument I find decisive, and it comes from an unexpected direction.

In communist states, people told jokes about how communism actually worked. There is a vast surviving corpus of them, collected and studied. The jokes are not marginal — they were a genuine popular genre, told widely, and they display an entirely clear-eyed understanding of the gap between doctrine and reality.

So the public did not buy the ideology. Now ask: why would the leadership be more credulous than the population?

What reason is there to posit a gullibility gap running in that direction? Leaders are not selected for naïveté. If ordinary people can see that the king is not sent from heaven, surely some of the courtiers can see it too.

They may stand and applaud indefinitely. That is not evidence of belief; it is evidence of a room in which not applauding is dangerous.

My Estimate: Unbelief Is Higher at the Top

I would go further and say the proportion of non-believers in the leadership is probably higher than in the general public. Leaders see how the sausage is made.

They watch the political interests operate. They see the leader's fallibility from close range, the decisions taken for reasons that have nothing to do with doctrine, the lies told in meetings and the conniving that follows. All of it erodes the ideology, and it teaches them to see it as a thing produced for external consumption.

The public, seeing only the curtain, can merely guess at what is behind it. The leadership does not have to guess.

What I Cannot Establish

Precise figures are impossible. There is no way to survey the private beliefs of a dead politburo, and the memoirs are self-serving in both directions.

So I am not claiming to know the number. I am claiming that the categorical version — that leaders believe what they sell — is false, and that the burden is on anyone who wants to assert it to explain why the people with the best view of the machinery would be its most sincere adherents.