"Tyranny is an important phenomenon that operates by principles by which it can be recognized in its early emerging stages, and, if the people are vigilant, prepared, and committed to liberty, countered before it becomes entrenched.
The psychology of tyranny
Perhaps one of the things that most distinguishes those with a fascist mentality from most other persons is how they react in situations that engender feelings of insecurity and inadequacy. Both kinds of people will tend to seek to increase their power, that is, their control over the outcome of events, but those with a fascist mindset tend to overestimate the amount of influence over outcomes that it is possible to attain. This leads to behavior that often brings them to positions of leadership or authority, especially if most other persons in their society tend to underestimate the influence over outcomes they can attain, and are inclined to yield to those who project confidence in what they can do and promise more than anyone can deliver.
This process is aided by a common susceptibility which might be called the rooster syndrome, from the old saying, ""They give credit to the rooster crowing for the rising of the sun."" It arises from the tendency of people guided more by hope or fear than intelligence to overestimate the power of their leaders and attribute to them outcomes, either good or bad, to which the leaders contributed little if anything, and perhaps even acted to prevent or reduce. This comes from the inability of most persons to understand complex dynamic systems and their long-term behavior, which leads people to attribute effects to proximate preceding events instead of actual long-term causes.
The emergence of tyranny therefore begins with challenges to a group, develops into general feelings of insecurity and inadequacy, and falls into a pattern in which some individuals assume the role of ""father"" to the others, who willingly submit to becoming dependent ""children"" of such persons if only they are reassured that a more favorable outcome will be realized. This pattern of co-dependency is pathological, and generally results in decisionmaking of poor quality that makes the situation even worse, but, because the pattern is pathological, instead of abandoning it, the co-dependents repeat their inappropriate behavior to produce a vicious spiral that, if not interrupted, can lead to total breakdown of the group and the worst of the available outcomes.
In psychiatry, this syndrome is often discussed as an ""authoritarian personality disorder"". In common parlance, as being a ""control freak"".
The logic of tyranny
In Orwell's classic fable, Nineteen Eighty-Four, the protagonist Winston Smith makes a key statement:
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
Following the trial of the surviving Branch Davidians in San Antonio, Texas, in March, 1994, in which a misinstructed jury acquitted all the defendants of the main crimes with which they were charged, but convicted them of the enhancements of using firearms in the commission of a crime, the federal judge, Walter F. Smith, first dismissed the charges, correctly, on the grounds that it is logically impossible to be guilty of an enhancement if one is innocent of the crime. However, under apparent political pressure, he subsequently reversed his own ruling and sentenced the defendants to maximum terms as though they had been convicted of the main crimes, offering the comment, ""The law doesn't have to be logical.""
No. The law does have to be logical. Otherwise it is not law. It is arbitrary rule by force.
Now by ""logical"" what is meant is two-valued logic, which is sometimes also called Boolean, Aristotelian or Euclidean logic. In other words, a system of propositions within which a statement and its negation cannot both be true or valid. One of the two must be false or invalid. The two possible values are true and false, and every meaningful proposition can be assigned one or the other value.
A system of law is a body of prescriptive, as opposed to descriptive, propositions, that support the making of decisions, and therefore its logic must be two-valued. It is a fundamental principle of law that like cases must be decided alike, and this means according to propositions that exclude their contradictions.
It is also a fundamental principle of logic that any system of propositions that accepts both a statement and its negation as valid, that is, which accepts a contradiction, accepts all contradictions, and provides no basis for deciding among them. If decisions are made, they are not made on the basis of the propositions, but are arbitrary, and that is the definition of the rule of men, as opposed to the rule of law.
So what Winston Smith is saying is that freedom means being able to distinguish between a true proposition and a false one, and what his nemesis O'Brien therefore does to crush him is make him accept that ""2 + 2 = 5"", which cannot be true if the logic is Aristotelian. O'Brien represents the logic of arbitrary power, a ""logic"" we might call Orwellian, although Orwell, whose real name was Eric Blair, was strongly opposed to it.
The methodology of tyranny
The methods used to overthrow a constitutional order and establish a tyranny are well-known. However, despite this awareness, it is surprising how those who have no intention of perpetrating a tyranny can slip into these methods and bring about a tyranny despite their best intentions. Tyranny does not have to be deliberate. Tyrants can fool themselves as thoroughly as they fool everyone else.
Control of public information and opinion
It begins with withholding information, and leads to putting out false or misleading information. A government can develop ministries of propaganda under many guises. They typically call it ""public information"" or ""marketing"".
Vote fraud used to prevent the election of reformers
It doesn't matter which of the two major party candidates are elected if no real reformer can get nominated, and when news services start knowing the outcomes of elections before it is possible for them to know, then the votes are not being honestly counted."
