The innovation of buying all your drug patents from publicly funded research labs and then charging 1000x the cost of manufacturing the drug when it’s critical for people to continue living.
Fortunately the patent for the solution has long since expired.
As someone who read the books, the highlight of the show is S3E4 where they (more or less) faithfully recreated one of the best sequences in fantasy on screen, and it was incredible.
Everything around it was soap opera romantasy. 90% of the characters had any meaningful personalities sanded off, entire arcs from the plot were tossed out the window in favor of glorified fan fiction, and as you noted the final product was just a mess in terms of trying to follow along even for people who didn’t care about faithfulness of the adaptation. I won’t mourn it being gone; maybe we’ll get a decent animated adaptation in 10 years.
The modern conception definitely spawned as part of the larger “authoritarianism” propaganda at the start of the Cold War. I’d say the idea that one person rules with an iron fist is the simplistic view of politics stretching back throughout civilization though, so it’s not exactly an original idea.
Autocracy does not exist. There is no example in history of a single person holding unilateral control over an entire nation, its people, and its industry. There are plenty of examples of things that look like autocracy on the surface, but power is fundamentally built in collaboration and hierarchy, and each of those cases was simply the captain or figurehead of a larger power structure that pulled all the strings. This is important because a belief in dictatorship of an individual leads to an obsession with the individual rather than the power structure behind them that is ultimately responsible.
If you went back in time and put a bullet between Hitler’s eyes in 1920 the Nazis would still rise to power in Germany in the 30s, because the Nazis were simply the face of German nationalists and capitalists who saw the crises of their time and decided to let the monsters off the leash in exchange for a steady supply of slave labor and a complete decimation of labor unionists and socialists. In a similar vein, Trump is merely the chief idiot and Judas goat for American capital scrambling to adapt to a world where their hegemony is rapidly deteriorating and the crises of capitalism are no longer able to simply be outsourced through wanton imperialism. He is simply Foucault’s boomerang come home at long last. Concentrating purely on him and the handful of other chief idiots around him does no good, because if you get rid of him he will simply be replaced by the machine that gave rise to him to begin with.
And this leads to my ultimate point here: the American system yearns for a Trump. The US was built from the ground up to serve the interests of capital, to prioritize those who have an iron grip on the engines of economic might, whether those be cotton plantations, steel mills, or data centers. This is not the first time the US has thrown minorities into camps, or stamped its boot on the face of other countries and peoples, or torn off the mask of the rule of law in favor of the rule of force, and so long as the system remains as is it will not be the last time either. If you fixate on Trump, then you will go back to sleep in four years and ignore the countless crimes of his successors, and the outcome will be the same.
The inevitable conclusion of 50 years of neoliberalism running your country is that you end up with a generation of capitalists and political leaders that can’t manufacture anything, don’t understand how manufacturing works, have no concept of the kind of infrastructure necessary to manufacture things, and need a panel of experts to politely explain that not only does their country not have the personnel or facilities to manufacture things but that the social mechanisms for educating that workforce and building those facilities have atrophied from non-use to the point of collapse.
And this is ignoring the fact that production lines have become so used to literal millions-strong workforces being centralized in massive Asian cities (that the west can’t build because of fifty million other reasons all along the same lines of atrophied levers of power and total contradiction with major profit centers, like mass transit or basic urban planning) that even if we did manage to overcome all those problems we’d still be radically changing what existing supply chains look like and essentially reinventing the core business model of dozens of major industries at once while they’re still running at typical capacity, something that capitalists famously love doing.
There’s a whole lot of finding out about to happen.
Professional scientists and researchers are famous for spontaneously popping out of the aether like quantum foam, completely disconnected from any causality or prior state of being.