What happens when a tyrant is old and senile?

American Greatness has an article entitled, The Emptiness of the Ideology and Tyrants Threatening Us.

We don’t have to look too far to notice little dictators from the top office of the presidency to the lowly bureaucrats on your local school board. It seems everyone wants power, even if only for a little bit, and like kids on the playground, people become accustomed to bullying people, while a bigger bureaucrat bullies them.

In his essay, “On Tyranny,” Brodsky reflects on what happens when a tyrant is old and senile. Such a tyrant is strange because he is trying to remain relevant to the masses, yet the masses don’t know how to react to him anymore. “The aging tyrant’s sole purpose,” writes Brodsky, “is to retain his position, and his demagoguery and hypocrisy do not tax the minds of his subjects with the necessity of belief or textual proliferation.” Be he old or new, there always arises a “blend of hypocrisy and cruelty.” The tyrant’s mission is an eradication of individualism, and as Brodsky notes, “The idea of one’s existential uniqueness gets replaced by that of one’s anonymity.” This anonymity and an annihilation of the soul is particularly visible today in a blatantly ideological and coercive usage of masks.

Certainly, what’s been the most troubling aspect of our time right now is how many people are willing to turn themselves into dutiful subjects of the tyrants.