BECOME A TYRANT IN 3 STEPS
By Mary E. Webster
March 8, 2014
NewsWithViews.com
Since tyranny is the eventual fate of every society, I like to share the insight about how it develops. My Number One has a great definition of tyranny: When ordinary acts become illegal.
What if you want to become a tyrant? What would you do to become a dictator in your home, community, town, state, or country?
First: Declare Your Devotion
Proclaim that you want to support and help the people in your community. You tell each person that you agree with their pet peeves, you understand their frustrations, and you know how to improve their life. You tell each person what they want to hear.
If you don’t have a personality disorder, you haven’t had someone rip away your naiveté, or you are not a student of psychology, this may seem counterintuitive. Until I read Federalist Paper Number 1, I didn’t realize that this is the first step of every tyrant. Then I thought about Hitler. I had always wondered how he had gotten so much power. It was a quick step to realizing how people in everyday life gain power over other people. I’ll mention a few examples and perhaps you can add some more from your own experiences:
• A pimp picks up a runaway at the bus station, proclaiming his desire to protect the youngster like an older brother.
• A con artist guarantees to increase the value of a person’s life savings as he empathizes with their desire to support their elderly parents.
• A gang promises a teenager that they will be his family and his protector.
• An abusive spouse was originally the most doting and romantic date.
• The cult leader promises happiness, maybe utopia, then tyrannizes his followers.
History teaches us that men who have overturned the liberties of republics usually began their career by proclaiming their devotion to the people.[1]
Second: Create an Emergency
Some emergency situations are obvious: a hurricane, tornado, earthquake, tsunami, or war can devastate a community, state, or country. Individuals can experience emergencies: illness, accidents, job loss, and abuse.
Remember that as a potential tyrant, you want to make ordinary acts illegal. What can you do if there is no emergency situation? Create an emergency!
• Wife’s emergency: infidelity
• Husband’s emergency: bankruptcy
• Preacher’s emergency: hell
• Mayor’s emergency: obesity
• State’s emergency: deforestation
…Tyranny…frequently grows out of the assumptions of unconstitutional power that is needed in an emergency…[2]
Third, make a tyrannical law
As a tyrant, you need to create behavioral rule that (1) will not solve the potential emergency and (2) doesn’t apply to you.
• Wife’s rule: husband can look at no other women, including in movies and television.
• Husband’s rule: block wife from all sources of the family’s money.
• Preacher dictates his congregation’s apparel, dating habits, and marriage partners.
• Mayor bans large glasses of soda and coconut oil in movie theater popcorn. [An aside: It seems like every day on “The Doctors” they talk of new ways to get health benefits from coconut oil.]
• State bans removing dead trees from publicly owned forests.
"…Every law the House of Representatives passes will operate on the Representatives and their friends, as well as the society. This is another restraint on the power. This creates a strong bond and common interests between rulers and the people. Few governments have this feature. And without it, every government degenerates into tyranny…If the people of America ever tolerate a law that does not apply to legislators, as well as on the people, the people will be prepared to tolerate anything but liberty."[3]
History Proves the Theory
If you don’t believe that an entire country can be scammed, think of what we’ve seen in the last hundred years: Lenin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, and Mao Zedong.
"… Tyranny more frequently grows out of the assumptions of unconstitutional power that is needed in an emergency but is not included in a defective constitution, than out of the full exercise of the largest constitutional authorities.”[4]
More important to our discussion of the U.S. Constitution are the “assumptions of unconstitutional power that is needed in an emergency” by the United States federal government. In hindsight, we easily see that Japanese-American internment camps during World War II are an example.
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Other assumptions of unconstitutional power may be less easy to notice because they are accepted parts of the national fabric, they seem innocuous, and/or they seem to actually solve an emergency problem. For example, national parks, federal department of education, and affordable health care. However, on examination, each is a tyrannical use of federal power.
In future articles, I will attempt to convey a full explanation of federal powers as defined in The Federalist Papers. By understanding the limited federal powers granted by the U.S. Constitution, we can understand both where tyranny has crept into the system and why the federal government is so expensive, which is just another form of tyranny.
Footnotes:
1.
Federalist Paper Number 1, paragraph 4, The Federalist Papers: Modern
English Edition Two, 2008
2.
Federalist Paper Number 20, paragraph 18, The Federalist Papers: Modern
English Edition Two, 2008
3.
Federalist Paper Number 57, paragraphs 12-13, The Federalist Papers: Modern
English Edition Two, 2008
4.
Federalist Paper Number 20, paragraph 18, The Federalist Papers: Modern
English Edition Two, 2008
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Mary E Webster, a graduate of St. Paul College and the University of Iowa, started studying The Federalist Papers in 1994. Her books, including a 10th-grade reading level translation of the Papers, The Federalist Papers: Modern English Edition Two, and The U.S. Constitution: Annotated with The Federalist Papers in Modern English make the timeless arguments within the Papers available to everyone. Webster is related to Noah and Daniel Webster and a direct descendent of several signers of the Mayflower Compact.
Website: Mary.Webster.org
Email: marywebster00@gmail.com
