The Servants of Tyranny: How Oppression Persists Through Compliance, Learned Helplessness, and the Failure to Think
By Yared Haile-Meskel
Authoritarian regimes do not survive through the sheer force of a single ruler; they depend on ordinary individuals who enforce oppression, follow orders, and sustain the system—often without questioning their role. Whether military officers, bureaucrats, journalists, activist, Dicones, professors, Monks, Pasters, motivational speakers, informants, or ideological enforcers, these individuals become agents of tyranny not necessarily out of malice but through obedience, survival instincts, or indoctrination.
Ethiopia’s 50-Year Experience: How Tyranny Survives Through Its Servants
Ethiopia’s modern history vividly illustrates how those who serve tyranny become its enforcers. The fall of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974 led to the rise of the Derg, a military junta that ruled with brutal repression. By removing one king we replaced him with 120 and thousands self-righteous, all-knowing ideologues. Tyrannies survival depended on soldiers, bureaucrats, and informants who carried out mass executions, imprisoned dissidents, and silenced opposition—not necessarily because they were sadistic but because they followed orders without questioning their moral responsibility.
Even after the Derg collapsed in 1991, Ethiopia continued to experience authoritarian governance, with successive regimes maintaining control through surveillance, suppression, and ideological conditioning. Those who once suffered under tyranny often became its new enforcers, either out of necessity or because they had internalized the system’s logic—becoming part of an oppressive cycle rather than breaking free from it.
Antonio Gramsci: Why the Oppressed Can Become Agents of Their Own Oppression
Antonio Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony helps explain why the oppressed sometimes act in ways that uphold their own subjugation. He argued that ruling elites maintain power not just through force but by shaping societal beliefs, making their ideology appear like common sense. The oppressed, instead of resisting, often internalize the dominant system, defending it or even attacking those who challenge it.
In authoritarian states, this manifests in citizens policing each other, silencing dissent, and reinforcing the regime’s ideology. In Ethiopia, for instance, students and intellectuals who once fought imperial rule later became enforcers of the Derg’s ideology, believing they were advancing a revolutionary cause while unknowingly perpetuating oppression.
Learned Helplessness: Why People Stop Resisting
The psychological concept of learned helplessness explains why individuals under tyranny often stop resisting, even when opportunities for change arise. Repeated exposure to oppression and failed attempts at resistance lead people to believe that no action can change their fate, creating passivity and resignation.
In Ethiopia, decades of repression produced a population where many ceased to challenge authority, fearing inevitable punishment. Even when political openings emerged, skepticism and disengagement prevailed, as many believed no real change was possible—a mindset deeply embedded in societies where learned helplessness has taken root.
Hannah Arendt: The Role of Thinking in Resisting Tyranny
Hannah Arendt’s concept of thinking provides a crucial key to breaking the cycle of oppression. She argued that tyranny thrives when individuals stop engaging in deep, reflective thought. Adolf Eichmann—the Nazi bureaucrat whose trial inspired her theory—was not driven by ideological hatred but by thoughtless obedience, failing to examine the consequences of his actions.
In oppressive regimes, individuals who serve tyranny often execute orders without questioning why they do so. Arendt believed that genuine thinking—an internal dialogue where one critically examines reality—creates a moral barrier against blind compliance. Without this, tyranny is sustained not just by fear but by a failure to think.
Breaking the Cycle: A New Consciousness
For 30 plus years I have been criticizing successive tyrannical governments in Ethiopia, Many like me were thinking changing the government is good enough to remove tyranny. That is a total underestimation of the problem within 130 million people, and more than 4 million bureacrats, civil servants, military officers police, journalists, judges and lawyers and other agents of oppression, understanding these dynamics is crucial for dismantling oppression. Encouraging critical thinking, fostering independent institutions, and questioning ideological conditioning can help individuals recognize their complicity in tyranny and reclaim their agency. As Gramsci suggested, true liberation requires not just political change but a transformation in consciousness of the society—one that rejects learned helplessness and reclaims the ability to think.
Arendt completes this view: thinking itself is an act of resistance. A society that fosters independent thought creates individuals who refuse to be mere instruments of oppression, breaking the cycle that keeps tyranny alive.