This is why you see dictators crack down on journalists; while the narcissist loves praise, he hates criticism no matter how deserved. Well, it's part of the reason. One other reason is that dictatorships are based on mythologies that put the dictator at the center of the universe. Typically a dictator establishes legitimacy by painting "others" as the source of all societal problems, and the dictator will solve those problems by subjugating the "other". Of course that's not true, and journalists will unhelpfully point that out, so usually the first thing to go under a dictatorship is the free press.
And it goes on from there. As you start persecuting the "others" they will use the judicial system for redress and they will receive it. So then they have to stack the courts.
People will see this and attempt to elect new leaders. So then they have to kill elections, or at least rig them.
The political opposition will thwart your agenda, so they have to get rid of them as well. That's when political purges start happening.
Their own institutions like the Department of Health, Labor, Economy, War or what have you will issue reports that show the problems are not improving, despite the fact that the "others" have been persecuted into the ground. That's when they start installing unqualified quislings into these bureaucracies who will push their agenda.
Of course, now that they've gutted the government of all competency things will begin getting worse and people will start to get upset with you. That's not good for narcissistic supply. So they find a new "other" to persecute.
The cycle repeats as more and more groups are isolated, persecuted, and driven from society. But the problems are never fixed because there's no attempt to even fix them. It's all a game of shifting shells that never ends. But one thing is true through all of this: their ego is happy, so that's all that matters to the dictator.
This is why dictators usually face a bloody end. They build the pressure up to a point where it is explosive, and then they find themselves hiding in a hole in the ground, cowering in a bunker with a loaded gun, or hanging from a gas station.
Dictators and corruption are indeed inseparable. But the present UK government is also being shaken by revelations of extensive corruption.
Corruption is insidious; it starts with buddies of the glorious leader, leading to businesses that are founded on corruption, ending up with almost every official in every capacity becoming corrupt, including policemen and army officers. In the process the people are impoverished, markets are kneecapped, and the currency becomes debauched. Honesty and honour become a liability.
I'm much more scared of corruption than ideology X or ideology Y. If you're lucky enough to live in a country where the rule of law still sort-of works, you'd better hope that corruption is stamped out as soon as it's head pops up.
This is a problem with all hierarchically-driven organizations in the absence of adequate checks and balances, not just dictatorships. It affects all sorts of privately-run hierarchies as much as the various sorts of internal hierarchies which operate within governments (including, to a varying extent, nominally democratic ones).
Of course, it's not always clear that these problems can be even mitigated, let alone resolved. We still use large organizational hierarchies to do all sorts of things 'at scale', while acknowledging their drawbacks.
The problem with dictatorships is the dictator. Dictators are typically Cluster B personalities: narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths. Dictatorships don’t revolve around the intelligence of the dictator, but around their ego. Dictators aren’t interested in doing what’s right for society, they are interested in doing what’s right for themselves. This is why they are so dangerous, because those two goals are often at odds.
For this reason, the dictator surrounds himself with toadies, lickspittles, sycophants, and generally other cluster B personalities who want to be a proxy for the dictator. This results in rampant government corruption and incompetence, as people end up in jobs for which they are not qualified, but which they earned through loyalty to the dictator.
So if you want to map a dictatorship’s intelligence I would say they converge to the intelligence of the worst, most power-hungry, morally and ethically bankrupt people in society.