Sic Semper Tyrannis

We’ve always had tyrants, and we always will. Tyrants, after all, are simply extremely successful entrepreneurs who have co-opted their systems to obtain control over most or all of the available human and economic resources. And having done that, “much wants more”, so before long they will wage war, at someone else’s expense, to get their hands on the wealth of still others. If things break their way, they ultimately get to be King Tut of the Universe.

To be honest, there’s a bit of tyrant in each of us, secretly fantasising about all that power and wealth. Fortunately, most of us don’t have the level of narcissism required to fuel the drive, and most of us have a working, constraining conscience. But there need only be one or two to shatter the peace and upend the universe.

Tyrants can only govern with permission – a permission sometimes wrung out of us by terror, but more often a permission traded off for a little piece of the action. History calls this feudalism – you will protect me from a foreign enemy, I get to keep my little hut, half the produce of my garden, and a goat, and you get to keep everything else and have your way with the womenfolk and foreigners. Europe’s royalty is nothing more than the descendants of Hell’s Angels on Horseback, or, if you like, a medieval protection racket.

Oftentimes tyrants don’t even need to trade anything tangible – we’ll quite willingly bargain away our freedom and welfare for the intangible. All we ask is protection from blasphemers, uppity women, perverts, and foreigners. As long as we are given a status greater than someone else, we’re happy to hand over all of our rights. The worst tyrannies are those in the guise of religion, ethnicity, and privilege, because the tyrant gets so much in exchange for so little.

Every tyrant has two problems. The first is mortality. Nobody gets to live forever, and every Stalin and Alexander and Atilla and Nero must bow the knee before the Grim Reaper. Similarly, every despotic regime becomes sclerotic and must ultimately collapse under the weight of accumulated guilt, graft, inefficiency, and injustice.

The second problem of all tyrants is the rest of us — all eight billion. Each of us has not only a unique palette of giftings, but a will to live, a will to have meaning and be valued. Each of us is born with a need to breathe free, to achieve, to enjoy, to fellowship, to love, and to be loved. We will not willingly or forever subsume our needs to those of the tyrant, no matter how cruel or how crafty. Suppressing the thought and expression of humankind works only in the short term.

It’s for this reason that Martin Luther King Jr. promised, “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”

Here’s to hope in 2023.