Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic depicts a man giving a baby a detailed, step-by-step guide to becoming an autocrat. He explains how to seize the treasury to control the military, identify the most influential people, bribe sixty percent of them into dependency, send the remaining forty percent on doomed foreign missions to ensure their public disgrace and death, then reduce the loyal sixty percent's population while increasing dependency and growing the military. The baby responds only with "goo" and "grrgh," oblivious to the sinister lesson.

The humor comes from the absurd juxtaposition of teaching Machiavellian political strategy to an infant. A bystander finally interrupts with alarm: "Are you turning Bobby into an autocrat in there?!" The man's wife scolds him, but he dismisses her concern with "Don't worry, she's part of the forty percent" -- implying he is already putting his own despotic plan into action against his own wife. The comic satirizes political theory -- particularly the "selectorate theory" from Bueno de Mesquita's The Dictator's Handbook -- which explains how autocrats maintain power by managing a small coalition of essential supporters while keeping the broader population weak and dependent.