Tyranny in Modern America

If you talk to a Boomer, they just don’t get it.

This applies to everything: mass immigration, America’s alliance with Israel, proxy wars with Russia, dating apps, the difficulty of finding a wife in a modern economy where feminist-indoctrinated women are outearning young men, rising cost-of-living in America, DEI racial discrimination that punishes white men characterized by ordinary male sexuality, and anarcho-tyranny where criminal rapists are arrested, tagged, bagged, and then allowed to engage in recidivist criminal sprees as part of a catch-and-release ecological program.

Among many other topics.

Some of the Boomer viewpoints are reasonable. Some aren’t.

But there is never any intellectual common ground. There is never any good-faith attempt by the old to understand the young. If you don’t agree with clueless Boomers in a deferential way in response to their worthless, self-defeating advice… minor, factual disagreements cause them to get personally offended. Every conversation, we just end up talking past each other. The world has changed, and Boomers never did. They still believe that America is a rich, safe, 95% white ethnostate where you can walk into the lobby of a business and interview on-the-spot with a potential boss; where you can find a mentally-stable virgin wife with zero debt and zero tattoos at the local gas station, beach, church, shopping mall, or grocery aisle; where hard work and honest virtue is recognized, cultivated, and rewarded by a functional society.

The young are drowning.

The young are screaming out for someone to come help them. Nobody does. Nobody even acknowledges their problems. Suffering extends for decades, without any substantive relief. Deindustrialization wrecked the Rustbelt, and the Appalachians, in the 1970s… and 50 years later, nobody ever came to help them, even as hundreds of thousands of underemployed, alienated white American men killed themselves with opioids because of relentless, crushing despair. Boomers are doing fine, and they just don’t get it. If you explain to them what life is like in modern America, they just look at you and blink with this sort of confused, glassy stare: total disbelief. “It can’t be that bad,” they mutter… or “Don’t worry, I lived through Vietnam and the Carter presidency; America will always turn around.”

On some level, Boomers deserve our sympathy.

They grew up in a functional society, when America was the hegemonic military superpower, the world’s premier industrial base, and possessed a robust agricultural sector which could feed the entire world.

They cannot logically comprehend what it’s like to live in a dysfunctional society where every aspect of life is an opaque maze of Kafkaesque bureaucracy designed to parasitically extract resources from young white men, while adding friction. They cannot emotionally relate to the ritual humiliation of every school, every television network, every cultural outlet, every advertisement or poster or billboard, every university spending ten years of your formative development preaching that white men are the racial scapegoat of a new caste system based on the inherited blood-guilt of colonialism, imperialism, slavery, or whatever trendy microaggression is the cultural flavor of the week. Every single one of America’s major institutions (media, academia, churches, public schools, banks, hospitals, NGOs, conservative think tanks, Fortune 500 companies, Silicon Valley social media platforms, the military, the FedGov bureaucracy, etc..) spent ten years kicking white men while they were down, and they never stopped.

Our institutions spent a decade emasculating young boys, bullying teenagers, and physically castrating unfortunate “transgender youth”. These were not grown men, who could defend themselves. These were not adults, with well-rounded perspectives who could emotionally detach and reflect on a hostile educational complex. These were not self-employed professionals, with the adult maturity to adapt and persevere. Our institutions made victims of young boys. Our institutions did everything they could to destroy young American white men. These were children, in an awkward phase of immaturity and self-actualization, trying to develop from boys to men. And at every stage of their growth, young men were sabotaged by vast bureaucratic forces and billion-dollar budgets and transnational media campaigns designed to break them down and kill their nascent self-confidence.

It remains ongoing.

For young white male Christian Zoomers in America, the story of their childhood (from the years 2014-2024) is suffering a sustained, decade-long campaign of deliberate, coordinated, systemic, institutionalized persecution and humiliation… inflicted by every proximate adult authority figure (teachers, pastors, priests, television anchors, Hollywood celebrities, politicians; everyone got in on the performative action of publicly repenting for slavery, colonialism, and white civilization by blaming young men who had nothing to do with any of it).

It’s easy to spend someone else’s money; it’s easy for adults to racially scapegoat confused teenagers. Old white men spent ten years punishing younger white men, under the pretense that DEI would absolve them of inherited racial guilt.

This was a prolonged betrayal, on the part of adult authority figures, purposefully crippling and stunting the children they were sworn to protect.

There’s been zero accountability.

None of the Boomers have admitted what they did, or encouraged, or allowed.

Additionally, Boomers are financially insulated from the rapid, widespread deterioration of the global economy and the American social order.

They bought into the stock market and the housing market in the 1990s, before asset inflation skyrocketed. They bought real stuff with real money, before the dollar was diluted by the Federal Reserve’s “quantitative easing” in the aftermath of the 2008 subprime housing crisis; before Biden flooded trillions of dollars of liquidity into the Covid lockdowns.

Boomers live in safe, mostly-white, mostly-geriatric suburbs and gated communities, far away from the dangers of a multicultural anarcho-tyranny that releases a criminal underclass into the community and then prosecutes vigilantes who attempt to privately defend themselves from the de facto paramilitaries which are used as decentralized, leaderless proxies of the hostile FedGov Leviathan.

People tend to be confused by the idea of anarcho-tyranny. But it’s relatively simple.

It’s a caste system, where laws are selectively enforced.

Criminals roam wild; civilians are punished for self-defense; the inevitable result is rape and murder, but lawyers and judges and politicians play the role of Pontius Pilate, washing their hands of blood-guilt.

Anarcho-tyranny: anarchy is “no law”, tyranny is “bad law”. Anarchotyranny is the combination of “no law” for criminals, and “bad law” crushing innocent citizens, implemented through selective enforcement of the law.

Rapists and murderers are given probation or cashless bail; vigilantes are prosecuted with the full force of the government. Vigilantes either receive long prison sentences, or are bankrupted by legal fees.

The process is the punishment.

And you may have a theoretical right to own a gun as a free citizen, but as a practical affair, most citizens lack the financial capability to risk shooting that gun, to pay the price of exercising their abstract unalienable rights of life and liberty and property, even in obvious cases where self-defense prevented an imminent threat of severe injury or death.

Homeless drug addicts, and violent paranoid schizophrenics, are allowed to roam the downtowns of every major American city. Criminals are sacred cows in the religion of Western egalitarianism. This is “stochastic terrorism”, and the villains in this story are the local judges and district attorneys who function as criminal enablers facilitating a revolving door of stabbings, beatings, burglaries, carjackings, robberies, rapes, and murders.

A tiny percentage of criminals are the cause of the vast majority of crime. Something like 1-2% of the worst criminals are involved in 40-60% of all violent felonies. It’s a Pareto distribution, like every other aspect of life, where a handful of top-performing outliers are responsible for the production of an entire field.

This problem could be solved with very little trouble. Locking up a couple hundred of the worst criminals in every major American city would immediately eliminate the majority of violent crimes.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

This is life under tyranny.

America was conquered a long time ago. It happened quietly, with covert Marxist infiltration of the bureaucracy and the university system, according to the principles of Antonio Gramsci. This was the Long March of the Institutions.

As a young American, there’s a sense of grim fatalism in the process of getting “Red-pilled”. There’s a tragedy in the perspective of men like Spengler, Evola, Thucydides, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Shelby Foote. The more you read about history, the more you realize these are gigantic macroeconomic forces, huge geopolitical competitions, and self-accelerating technological waves of industrial disruption. Individuals are very small next to the military invasions, dynastic intrigues, and technological innovations that change the world.

What is the original cause, the ultimate seed of these troubles…

When did our problems begin?

Did this crisis of American decline, the increasingly-obvious decay of the Global American Empire, begin under Obama? Was it Bill Clinton? Was it Reagan’s amnesty, or Reagan’s no-fault divorce? Was it the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson? Was it Hart-Celler in 1965, or the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or the end of Bretton Woods in 1971, when President Nixon disconnected gold from the dollar? Was it desegregation in 1957, when President Eisenhower sent the American military into Little Rock, Arkansas to march behind local white teenagers with fixed bayonets? Was it the bureaucracy entrenched by FDR during the Great Depression? Was it Lincoln’s Civil War of 1861, and the decades of racial terror inflicted during the postwar Southern Reconstruction? Was it the French Revolution of 1789?

It’s a puzzle.

A riddle.

The answer is: our problem is entropy. Social corrosion. And entropy does not occur as a single finite event. It’s a process. It’s an ongoing continuum, rising and receding in oceanic waves that just keep hitting against the jagged rocks of the shoreline.

When asked how to solve this centuries-long process of entropy, I always point to the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 as one of the main laws that needs to be repealed, or simply ignored in the fashion of an extrajudicial, post-constitutional Caesar. The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 created the modern bureaucracy, in a less-developed form, by splitting off the professional managerial caste from the executive authority of the American President. It created the Deep State, and made it impossible for the American people to participate in any real sense in a representative democracy, or republic, or whatever we want to call it, because the American people can elect a President, and the President is the nominal boss of the executive branch of government, but as a result of the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883, the American President lacks the power to fire government employees.

The previous system, exemplified by the administration of Andrew Jackson, was known as the “spoils system”. American Presidents were elected into power, and they immediately purged the entire government and put their own loyalists in control. Elections had consequences, as Obama would tell us.

What we live under now, the rule of self-appointed experts, the entrenchment of credentialed gatekeepers and ossified institutions and debt-based pyramid schemes, is a permanent government that runs on bureaucratic autopilot. Soviet-era Brezhnev stagnation is the rule of the day. Every decision is laundered through a committee. Nobody is held accountable, except for whistleblowers who attempt to challenge institutional legitimacy. In this system, politicians are reduced to semiotic performers, Girardian scapegoats who are elevated and ritually sacrificed by the mob… and a Senator can sleep with his interns, or a Senator can steer peripheral bribes to his friends, but these politicians function as a useful layer of insulation between national outrage and the technocratic machinery of legalistic bureaucrats who actually make decisions behind the scenes.

The reason Boomers don’t understand life is because America used to be a functional society, and now it’s a dysfunctional tyranny. And a dysfunctional tyranny is governed by a completely different set of logical patterns than we reflexively assume are the default conditions of civilization.

Civilization is artificial. Civilization is unnatural. Civilization is manmade. It is created by men, it only persists as long as men choose to actively sustain it and participate in it and pass it down to their children and grandchildren. Antibiotics, chemical fertilizer, electricity, air conditioning, indoor plumbing, and petroleum engines are manmade artifacts that improve our lives, but they do not sustain themselves, and if you import a hundred million Somalians to repair your machines, suddenly you are going to have a lot more crime and a lot of machines that mysteriously are rusting and malfunctioning and breaking down ahead of the scheduled termination date for their expected product lifespan.

Civilization must be actively renewed and rebuilt in the eternal struggle against entropy and barbarism; marriage is likewise an unnatural and artificial and manmade invention by men to solve the sexual tensions that are inherent to the human condition — and when you abandon the prosocial pair-bonding norms that produced early family formation during the past thousand years of Western civilization, you end up with the sexual atavism and female-centered “hookup culture” and African disorder that now consumes the youth.

All of this is a lot to take in.

The image of America which Boomers believe in, is the America that used to exist, and no longer does. It is the America of the 1950s until the 1990s, a place of dynamic economic growth and individual social mobility. That is the image you see in movies, and television networks, and social media. That is the world that died in 2008, when the subprime housing crisis imploded a global credit bubble… only to re-inflate the bubble to protect the wealthy. Everyone who grew up in the aftermath of this seismic financial catastrophe has suffered the consequences of a Potemkin economy built to prop up the illusion of halcyon prosperity, and the zero-interest rate policy (ZIRP) designed to inject artificial credit into the dead system.

The economy has been dead since 2008.

There is a technical term for this economic phenomenon, “zombie corporations”, and it refers to a company that doesn’t earn any profits, but which remains in business because existing cash flow is just barely enough to service regular debt payments, borrow additional loans, strip-mine assets to use as collateral, and keep paying fat salaries to executive leadership. It’s a good deal for the managers, who keep their high-paid jobs. It’s a bad deal for everyone else.

Businesses qualify as zombie companies after three years of sustained financial underperformance. According to Bloomberg, in 2010 less than 2% of the world’s publicly-traded companies had degenerated to the sustained financial underperformance of a “zombie company”. By 2023, that number had climbed to 6% of all publicly-traded companies; by that point there were more than 2,300 zombie companies globally.

Many of these companies look impressive on the outside. They’re the places everyone wants to work at. Prestige careers for college graduates of Ivy League schools. Multinational conglomerates which everyone and their mother has heard about. Many of these companies employ more than ten thousand full-time staff, and they manage upwards of $800 million in capital and assets. They sell real products. They bring in real, recurring cash flows of hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue.

And they’re dead.

They’ve been dead for years; but up close, the business seems alive.

They barely make enough money to keep the lights on, make payroll, and service the debt on their past borrowing, while leveraging and loading up with more debt, in order to keep the party going for another year, so that the CEO and CTO and CFO and the rest of the management team can pad their bank accounts.

You can scale up the metaphor. America spent almost $900 billion in 2024, purely to pay the INTEREST on the now $38 trillion in debt. The Global American Empire has become a no-hire, no-fire zombie corporation: bringing in $5 trillion per year in revenues while spending $7 trillion in outlays, earning just enough to service its debt, while printing and borrowing more. This sort of flaccidly coasting along like a dead shark for a 20-year-run is acceptable to everyone who benefits from stasis, which means everyone who locked into a stable position before the 2008 subprime housing crisis killed social mobility for the next twenty years. The economic losers, the victims of this arrangement, are everyone who graduated high school after 2008, and found themselves unable to accumulate capital at historically normal rates.

If you don’t want generational warfare, if you don’t want a world where unmarried men and women hate each other, if you don’t want a world where old Americans and young Americans resent each other, this is a very bad way to design your economy.

It’s irresponsible.

When you send 90,000 factories to China, when you send 50 million middle-class jobs overseas, when you import 100 million foreigners and drive up housing prices by pumping demand along the margins, you are seeding the nation with bitter, intractable tensions. These problems are very easy to avoid at the start (don’t send all your factories and jobs to your biggest geopolitical peer competitor), but they are very difficult mistakes to escape after decades of doubling down on a reckless, self-destructive agenda.

Why is everything so crazy right now?

Why are the youth mentally-ill?

Young Americans are a bifurcated generation: they have split into two warring ideological tribes, the Left-Wing pink-haired gender goblin Bolsheviks, and the Right-Wing weight-lifting cult of vitalism, revanchism, and a religious reawakening that hints at the emergence of fanatical, crusading legions of passionate zealots. Zoomers are the Mad Max generation, born into the post-apocalyptic ruins of what used to be something beautiful.

All of this economic dysfunction is coming to a head because there is a critical mass of Zoomers reaching adulthood, and rapidly realizing that the economy is structured as a blood-sucking vampiric corpse siphoning wealth from the young to the old. Flooding the nation with 100 million foreigners drives down wages, crowds out entry-level jobs, triples the price of rents and home ownership, delivers crime along with gig apps, disintegrates the social fabric, and forces young Americans to load up on debt as they accumulate credentials out of a desperate attempt to escape the onslaught of low-skill immigration creeping up the value chain (which now has swamped the high-earning careers of accountants, doctors, and software engineers). There is nowhere to run. Software was the last industry for smart young white men to get rich, and now that’s gone. Every industry has been infested with foreign termites, locusts strip-mining the pastures and forests where good careers used to be, which brings the inevitable consequence of cratering salaries.

But flooding the nation with 100 million foreigners also functions as a subsidy for the old Boomers who caused all of these problems. It drives up housing prices, enriching asset owners, while at the same time suppressing wages and lowering prices, which slightly offsets the pain of inflation that has now diluted the dollar’s value since Nixon ended Bretton Woods in 1971.

At the end of the Bretton Woods System (1971), the price of gold was fixed at $35 per ounce. Since then, in 2025 the price of gold now trades around $4,150 per ounce. If we use gold as a proxy, one dollar in 1971 was worth approximately what $118 dollars is worth today. That’s an incredible amount of theft. The dollar has lost between 90-99% of its value in the past 50 years if we measure our money in anything real: cars, houses, gold, food, healthcare, college tuition. This systemic robbery is invisible, it’s incremental, and it’s hidden in a thousand clever tricks. Products are cheaper because of scale economies, technological innovation, hedonic adjustments, global supply chains, arbitrage of slave labor in India and China, and shrinkflation. It takes a long time to notice what’s wrong.

Or that anything is wrong.

Boomers still haven’t noticed, and it’s been fifty years. You could wait another fifty years for this trend to continue, and Boomers plugged into Warhammer 40k Golden Throne life-support would still be telling kids that everything is fine. It doesn’t bother them. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, or something like that.

There was a lot of slack in the system; there’s a lot of ruin in a nation, but at some point we run out of stall tactics and moderate solutions and half-measures. America was a rich country, and America can be a rich country again if we’re smart and tough and ruthless, but we need to be honest about today’s reality: America has now been strip-mined and plundered and sold-off to the highest bidder. America is now a poor country. It’s been ruined, and hollowed out. This country has a lot of pride, and a lot of talent, but it’s been reduced to a diminished shell of its former glory.

If you talk to a Boomer, they just don’t get it.

And the reason why is because Boomers grew up in a functional country. Their parents were the soldiers who won WW2, and their parents enjoyed massive government support along every stage of life after 1945.

The G. I. Bill helped WW2 veterans transition home to America, attend college (at a time when they weren't competing against 100 million foreigners for entry-level jobs, at a time when America hadn't yet sent 90,000 factories overseas), provided low-interest home loans that veterans could purchase with no down payment, provided business loans, provided farm loans, and provided veterans with unemployment assistance for up to 52 weeks. More than 8 million WW2 veterans used the GI Bill. The 1944 GI Bill was followed by the 1952 Korean War GI Bill, the 1966 Vietnam Era GI Bill, and the 1984 Montgomery GI Bill.

This is not to mention the housing assistance that was available to WW2 veterans.

The postwar housing boom offered WW2 veterans a generous menu of choices: Levittown’s mass-produced Cape Cods, roughly 17,000 homes in New York and another 17,000 in Pennsylvania, popping up at a pace of one every sixteen minutes; GI-Bill suburban tract homes, which ultimately helped finance well over two million new mortgages for veterans in the late 1940s and 1950s; prefabricated houses and Quonset-hut specials, tens of thousands of them (about 150,000 Quonset huts repurposed nationwide) arriving like boxed appliances for families who needed shelter immediately; temporary veteran housing projects, with cities throwing up hundreds of thousands of units, from barracks-style apartments to emergency cottages designed to last five years and often lasting fifteen; the federal Veterans Emergency Housing Program, which pushed the construction industry to add over a million new homes in just two years during the worst of the shortage; and finally the FHA-approved ranch houses of the 1950s, part of the enormous 15 million suburban houses built between 1947 and 1960, baby-boom-ready and garage-forward.

Taken together, these options absorbed millions of returning soldiers and transformed the United States into a suburban nation almost overnight.

All of this is retroactively painted as a happy and carefree project, but I think the post-WW2 American government was scared of their own army. There were millions of hungry, ruthless soldiers who wanted a good life, an army that had conquered the world and was capable of overthrowing the American government. A certain element of self-preservation was involved in the GI Bill, and the Levittown homes, which smoothly and hurriedly transitioned the veterans of WW2 from soldier to civilian.

No such program today exists for young Zoomer Americans.

And if you asked for a project on this scale: 5 million homes, rapidly built and funded by the American government to help young American men get married and start a family, older generations would call you a Socialist. Perhaps they’re correct. Perhaps not. But the important thing to remember is that idle hands are the devil’s workshop, and when millions of angry young men are sitting around without a wife, without kids, without a future, without a stable career, without any tangible stake in the American system, you are asking for trouble. When Julius Caesar’s legions returned from Gaul, they wanted land reform, and their frustrations with the rigged economy of the Roman Empire led to the paroxysms of a brutal civil war. The Roman Senate was happy with the state of the world; their legions were not. Cato, Brutus, and Cicero all had their pretty rhetoric and poetic rationalizations, but the same naked self-interest characterized their entire social caste.

There is a simpler way to look at all of this.

The era of mass conscription began with the Napoleonic Wars, and ended with WW2. Around that time, nations fought by mobilizing millions of patriotic soldiers to fight as individual riflemen. Newspapers, radio, and broadcast television communicated a shared culture and a shared sense of identity, broadcasting with one-way communication that traveled from publisher to audience.

Around that time, governments were structured in an (often brutal) efficient, pro-human way. In order to win wars, they needed lots of men, those men needed to be in good health to fight, and those men needed a reason to die (a wife, kids, and ownership of a small plot of land).

In more recent years, managerialism and weapons technology has shifted to an anti-human structure.

Wars are now fought with bombs, tanks, trucks, planes, helicopters, drones, satellites, submarines, and decided with small armies of volunteers who leverage technological superiority rather than raw numbers of riflemen marching in formation. Governments don’t want a ten-million-man army. Our managerial technocrats write books about The Population Bomb (1968), birth control, condoms, abortion, and how to reduce the power of the American middle class.

Armies are smaller. And the media is different.

Social media is decentralized.

Old forms of media involved a one-way conversation, where a publisher preached a sermon to the audience. The Internet is democratized, it is decentralized, it is dehumanized, and the one-way sermon has become a two-way debate. Legacy media despises the power of their audience. Every old website has locked or paywalled their comments section, to filter out dissent. But the new forms of social media are a melee. They are an absolute shitshow, and every user who thrives in this cafeteria food fight is a rabid monkey flinging shit in a display of primal dominance. The new media ecosystem is a prison yard, and every day on the Internet, reputations are being built by shanking the biggest and meanest motherfucker on the yard.

The managerial bureaucracy sees their own citizens as deadweight.

Inconvenient.

During the Covid lockdowns, workers were classified as “essential” or “nonessential”. Everyone was given an uncomfortable wakeup call as to their relative social rank in the incumbent hierarchy. Implicit roles were made explicit, and legible.

Young men discovered, en masse, they are classified as “excess”.

The desire to sedate young men with porn, weed, junk food, and video games; the desire to reduce population with abortion, condoms, and birth control pills; the desire to exterminate rural whites by flooding their communities with OxyContin; the desire to terrorize whites by flooding their communities with Somalians, Haitians, and terrorists from Afghanistan — these are all the same thing. Or, more precisely, they are various deviant behaviors and social policies which all proceed from the same underlying ethos, the same shared psychological impulse.

It’s anti-human.

The key shift, perhaps, is that young men are no longer valued as infantry soldiers for the purposes of mass conscription. Their dreams, their ambitions, their romances, their masculinity, their passions — all of this is seen as a destabilizing threat to the status quo. It is energy. Scorching heat. Blazing fire. And this energy is Dionysian embodying chaos and exuberant delights, it is Apollonian personifying clarity and purpose, it is the Faustian spirit striving for something higher and greater and beautiful. It is the human spirit, and it is powerful, and it is ancient, and it is unconquerable, and they fear it as they might fear accidentally stumbling against Pandora's Box.

Because when they look at young white men, they see the all the world’s horrors inside Pandora’s Box. They see the Holocaust, ovens with gas, concentration camps with stern-faced guards and gaunt, emaciated prisoners with hollow cheeks and skeletal ribs. They see slavery, and colonialism, and imperialism, and Hiroshima erupting in a cloud of dust. When they look at white men, they see Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island.

You will never be anything but a nuclear bomb to these people.

John Wick is a man of focus… commitment… sheer will. He is a man of patience, of agency, who can move in isolation and stand against the crowd. He is a cinematic symbol, and they want you to sit in the audience and cheer him, they want you to passively observe him, but they do not want you to imitate him, they do not want any of you to become John Wick: a man of agency, of resolute clarity, of fearsome purpose, of solemn dangers and masculine delights.

All of this was explained two thousand years ago, by Aristotle. The tyrant seeks to control his subjects, to entrench his position, and he does this by bringing in foreigners to terrorize and weaken his population, he does this by discouraging free association between men of integrity and competence, he does this by constructing systems of mass surveillance, he does this by empowering women and slaves to undermine men of strength and vitality and courage who might dare to stand against the crowd.

For, as it was written:

Aristotle, Politics: Book Five: “Causes of Revolution and Political Instability”:

“The tyrant should lop off those who are too high; he must put to death men of spirit; he must not allow common meals, clubs, education, and the like; he must be upon his guard against anything which is likely to inspire either courage or confidence among his subjects; he must prohibit literary assemblies or other meetings for discussion, and he must take every means to prevent people from knowing one another (for acquaintance begets mutual confidence).

Further, he must compel all persons staying in the city to appear in public and live at his gates; then he will know what they are doing: if they are always kept under, they will learn to be humble… A tyrant should also endeavor to know what each of his subjects says or does, and should employ spies, like the ‘female detectives’ at Syracuse, and the eavesdroppers whom Hiero was in the habit of sending to any place of resort or meeting; for the fear of informers prevents people from speaking their minds, and if they do, they are more easily found out.

Another art of the tyrant is to sow quarrels among the citizens; friends should be embroiled with friends, the people with the notables, and the rich with one another.

Also he should impoverish his subjects; he thus provides against the maintenance of a guard by the citizen, and the people, having to keep hard at work, are prevented from conspiring. The Pyramids of Egypt afford an example of this policy; also the offerings of the family of Cypselus, and the building of the temple of Olympian Zeus by the Peisistratidae, and the great Polycratean monuments at Samos; all these works were alike intended to occupy the people and keep them poor.

Another practice of tyrants is to multiply taxes, after the manner of Dionysius at Syracuse, who contrived that within five years his subjects should bring into the treasury their whole property. The tyrant is also fond of making war in order that his subjects may have something to do, and be always in want of a leader.

And whereas the power of a king is preserved by his friends, the characteristic of a tyrant is to distrust his friends, because he knows that all men want to overthrow him, and they above all have the power.

Again, the evil practices of the last and worst form of democracy are all found in tyrannies. Such as the power given to women in their families in the hope that they will inform against their husbands, and the license which is allowed to slaves in order that they may betray their masters; for slaves and women do not conspire against tyrants; and they are of course friendly to tyrannies and also to democracies, since under them they have a good time.

For the people too would fain be a monarch, and therefore by them, as well as by the tyrant, the flatterer is held in honor; in democracies he is the demagogue; and the tyrant also has those who associate with him in a humble spirit, which is a work of flattery.

Hence tyrants are always fond of bad men, because they love to be flattered, but no man who has the spirit of a freeman in him will lower himself by flattery; good men love others, or at any rate do not flatter them. Moreover, the bad are useful for bad purposes; ‘nail knocks out nail,’ as the proverb says.

It is characteristic of a tyrant to dislike everyone who has dignity or independence; he wants to be alone in his glory, but any one who claims a like dignity or asserts his independence encroaches upon his prerogative, and is hated by him as an enemy to his power.

Another mark of a tyrant is that he likes foreigners better than citizens, and lives with them and invites them to his table; for the one are enemies, but the Others enter into no rivalry with him.

Such are the notes of the tyrant and the arts by which he preserves his power; there is no wickedness too great for him.

All that we have said may be summed up under three heads, which answer to the three aims of the tyrant. These are: 1.) the humiliation of his subjects; he knows that a beaten man will not conspire against anybody, 2.) the creation of mistrust among them, for a tyrant is not overthrown until men begin to have confidence in one another; and this is the reason why tyrants are at war with the good; they are under the idea that their power is endangered by them, not only because they would not be ruled despotically, but also because they are loyal to one another, and to other men, and do not inform against one another or against other men; 3.) the tyrant desires that his subjects shall be incapable of action, for no one attempts what is impossible, and they will not attempt to overthrow a tyranny, if they are powerless.

Under these three heads, the whole policy of a tyrant may be summed up, and to one or other of them all his ideas may be referred: 1.) he sows distrust among his subjects; 2.) he takes away their power; 3.) he humbles them.”

—Aristotle, Politics: Book Five: “Causes of Revolution and Political Instability”