What the Smart Tyrants Understand

Two things about tyranny.

One, a smart tyrant understands you give up your freedom yourself. It’s done gradually, with you hardly noticing. That way, you don’t resent it so much. You feel like it’s what you chose, even though it’s a contradiction in terms to exercise choice while you’re losing your capacity to exercise choice.

Two, a smart tyrant makes sure you’re as comfortable as possible. That’s where the Soviet tyranny, Castro’s tyranny and so many others went wrong. They promised a better life, if not for the people at the time, then a generation or two ahead. But it never came. It was exposed as a sham. But if you’re already comfortable, and the powers-that-be let you remain comfortable, so long as you give up certain freedoms (check the Bill of Rights for details) … well, then what could be wrong with that?

All of this counts on a lack of critical thinking. Critical thinking means objective thinking. Objectivity refers to the capacity (and willingness) to stand outside of your situation and look at what’s going on, even as you’re doing it, or even as it’s happening to you. For many decades now, our government and even most private educators, under the influence of malignant ideas in philosophy and elsewhere, have more or less bred the capacity for objective thinking out of most of us. Today’s woke insanity is merely a culmination of that trend — not its cause. Most people know the wokeness is insane, but along with objectivity, most of us have lost our intellectual self-confidence. When the intellect goes, then morality, prosperity and freedom tend to erode with it. Put simply, the dumber people become, the less of a need they will have to be free.

Totalitarianism and dictatorship have “worked” in Communist China, because the tyrants in that country are really smart. They understand that if people are comfortable, they probably won’t complain about being free. In America, it’s trickier, because unlike in China, there’s a rich (though comparatively short) history of freedom. So it’s especially important to keep the people comfortable and take away their freedoms only gradually.

And then there’s “democracy.” Democracy means the majority rules. Our sophisticated tyrants understand that so long as the majority is on board with everything that’s going on — at least tolerating it, and feeling comfortable ENOUGH — then the outliers will get nowhere. And that’s precisely what we’re seeing today.