The Obedience of the Damned

“The tyrants don’t concern me. What concerns me are those who are blindly obedient.”

That line, simple and unadorned, captures the essence of the modern dilemma. Tyrants have always existed. Every century gives birth to its strongmen, its ideologues, its bureaucrats with the soul of a warden. What changes—what determines whether tyranny thrives or collapses—is how many ordinary people are willing to follow orders. The machinery of oppression is never built by monsters alone; it’s assembled by millions of tiny, harmless hands.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt understood this better than anyone. In her reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, she coined the phrase the banality of evil to describe how ordinary men commit extraordinary crimes, not out of passion or hatred, but out of thoughtlessness. Evil, she realized, often wears the face of the dutiful employee—polite, punctual, unremarkable. Arendt’s insight was terrifying because it implied that tyranny doesn’t depend on madmen. It depends on mediocrity.

Fast-forward to our own age of sanitized authoritarianism—the world of public-health mandates, corporate censorship, and algorithmic compliance—and Arendt’s warning echoes with uncanny precision. During COVID, we watched neighbors turn into informants, coworkers into moral enforcers, and strangers into online inquisitors. It wasn’t the tyrants who frightened me most; it was the volunteers—the ones who lined up eagerly to police their peers, to shame, to ban, to report. Their obedience wasn’t coerced; it was self-righteous, almost pleasurable. They mistook compliance for virtue.

There is a peculiar comfort in obedience. To surrender your judgment to authority is to relieve yourself of responsibility. It’s warm there, inside the herd—no hard questions, no risk of exile. Psychologists call it conformity bias, but it feels more like a narcotic. People will endure almost any absurdity if it spares them the loneliness of thinking for themselves.

And so the cycle repeats. Today, the same faces who once shouted down dissent in the name of “safety” march again—this time under the banner of “resistance.” You see them at every protest, shouting into cameras, but when asked what they stand for, or against, there’s only noise. They hate Trump, or capitalism, or “fascism,” but if you press for specifics, the words dissolve. They don’t know why they hate. They just know that they do. They’re acting out someone else’s script, written by media algorithms and reinforced by social belonging.

Arendt would have recognized them instantly—not as revolutionaries, but as functionaries. They are not resisting power; they are obeying it. Their slogans may sound rebellious, but their obedience is total. They move as one, chant as one, rage as one. Their conformity is a kind of armor protecting them from the unbearable responsibility of independent thought.

This is what frightens me more than any despot or dictator—the quiet multitude of those who no longer feel the need to think. When truth becomes a social liability and obedience becomes a moral currency, tyranny doesn’t need to enforce itself. It perpetuates naturally.

We live in a civilization that confuses decency with compliance and courage with recklessness. But history’s real heroes—the men and women who stood against evil—were always the ones who refused the narcotic of obedience. They risked isolation, ridicule, sometimes death, to preserve the fragile integrity of conscience.

The tyrants will always rise; they always have. But their reign depends entirely on the rest of us—the willing, the comfortable, the obedient. The only antidote to tyranny is thought. The only resistance that matters is courage of mind.

And if we fail to think, we won’t need tyrants to destroy us. We’ll do it ourselves, quietly, obediently, together.

Editor’s Note: The Schumer Shutdown is here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this. Help us continue to report the truth about the Schumer Shutdown. Use promo code POTUS47 to get 74% off your VIP membership.