Every demagogue in history has begun by promising to free you.
To make things better.
That’s the part most people miss, especially when they’re inside it. The villain who tells you you’ve been wronged and the system is rigged against you and that he’s the only one who can break the chains. That’s not how a villain looks from the outside. It’s how a savior looks from the outside. The villain looks like the people on the other side, the ones defending the very system the savior promises to tear down. The realization that the savior was the villain usually arrives too late.
In the books I’m writing, (and there are spoilers ahead…) one of the antagonists, Alric Rusk, is doing this work. He approaches people with legitimate grievances — petals confined in the Garden, soldiers used as pieces in royal calculations — and tells them what they already know: you’ve been wronged.
He’s right about that. They have been wronged. Then he offers them a way out, and he’s right about that too. What he offers is real. The thing is this: what he offers isn’t freedom. It’s a different cage, in a different shape, with him at the top. The grievances become his lever. The lever becomes their new chain.
I want to name the specific failure mode, because it’s everywhere, and it doesn’t always wear the same clothes.
If someone tells you that the cure for being controlled by X is to be controlled by Y, they are not offering you freedom. They are offering you a transfer.
If someone tells you that this one strongman, just this once, is what it takes to break the system that’s been failing you, they are not offering you freedom. They are offering you a different warden.
Real freedom doesn’t have a strongman. It doesn’t ask you to trust someone else’s judgment about who is allowed to live and who is not. And it certainly doesn’t require you to give up the daily refusal to decide for others what they are allowed to be, even when that decision is being made by someone who claims to be on your side.
Anyone who promises to free you by deciding for you is selling you the original violation in a brighter package.
Free men and women are free only as long as they refuse to let someone make those choices for them. Once they abdicate their power to choose, the slow slippery slope to totalitarianism begins. And it’s hard to get off.