The totalitarian system, whether it’s the military or the communist system, is very useful for doing very simple things: fighting wars, imposing education, imposing some system of property rights, and building infrastructure. These are processes of execution, not of invention, research and development in consumer goods. But the totalitarian system cannot improve affairs when there is no understanding of what it must to to approve affairs. The totalitarian system cannot administrate what it does not understand, and it can only understand what is simple and preexisting.
The individualist system is superior for invention. It improves affairs. It is scientific not ideological, because science is simply trial and error. For this reason the individualist model is superior when you do not know what to do, because the resource which we call technological knowledge, has been exploited into applications that are beyond the grasp of any group of individuals.
If your civilization ‘falls behind’ or becomes ‘calcified by bureaucracy’ then totalitarianism (or revolution) are useful tools for fixing it. But individualism will always out-innovate totalitarianism because it places no prior (input based) constraint on the individual actors in the population.
We tend to think in terms of a mixed economy in which the state should focus on execution while the private sector focuses on invention. But our government is not constructed to facilitate this behavior. Its incentives are as Hoppe has shown, to consume cultural, civic, and resource capital as fast as possible in order to maintain power.
This doesn’t mean it’s not POSSIBLE to create a mixed government. It’s just not possible to do so under representative democratic republicanism in a heterogeneous polity where each generation possesses the illusion of their own genius, instead of possessing the wisdom that they are members of a cycle reacting to a chain of prior cycles, and that their preferences, beliefs and attitudes, are predictable.
It’s the technology that isn’t predictable.