Warning: This piece will likely challenge your existing views of reality…if you let it.
In my September piece, Why Democracy Fails, I reminded you that the sharpest minds of ancient Greece didn’t like democracy. They correctly predicted that the persuasive, the charismatic, and the greedy would exploit the system and turn democracy toward autocracy.
Sound familiar?
It’s a story as old as democracy itself. Athenian democracy only lasted 180 years, yet humans are notoriously bad at learning from history. Here’s the formula:
- A civilization rises to power through a unified vision and hard work.
- People become complacent and entitled.
- Things start to fall apart.
- People look for someone or something—besides themselves—to blame.
- A charismatic, power-hungry leader gives them that scapegoat, and they love him for it.
- Then things get really bad because he actually doesn’t care about anyone but himself.
- Eventually, things collapse, and the supporters rebel—without ever examining how they were duped in the first place.
- Political moderates take over for a while… until stagnation leads back to step 4.
A micro thought experiment: if people who couldn’t name three times in history when the above happened, were not allowed to vote, what difference might that make?
Answers include: Germany, Italy, Brazil, the Philippines, Venezuela, North Korea, Russia, Turkey, Nicaragua, Hungary, Belarus, Iraq, Uganda, Ghana, Libya, and more.
Most of the time, dictators are voted in democratically. This has happened so many times it’s kind of boring. The key ingredient that keeps the formula going?
Playing victim.
Sure, there may always be individuals who crave power above all else, but they are powerless without willing followers. We have this false notion that dictators seize control against the will of the majority, but that’s almost never how it works. The very idea is playing victim.
It’s a tragic fact that people give away their power when they already feel powerless. And feeling powerless is playing victim to your own choices as an adult, when it’s a projection of how you actually were a true victim as a child. It’s a form of codependence. The human tendency to blame another group for our problems is a well-worn path. It’s a primitive in-group vs. out-group orientation—only slightly more sophisticated than most animal behavior.
This victimhood is further fueled by another outdated idea: that there is such a thing as essential evil. This concept predates the notion of the unconscious by 2,000 years and is utterly obsolete. Every so-called evil act is explainable psychodynamically and comes from good, however misguided intentions. But the concept of evil is extremely useful if you want to avoid looking at your contribution to a problem. It’s the same old “The devil made me do it” excuse—far more popular than asking, “How did I do this to myself?”
It’s easy to focus on the manipulator rather than the manipulated. That’s what playing the victim is.
Hitler is the easiest target. But he didn’t invent anti-Semitism; he applied it. He was a brilliant opportunist who seized a moment when the masses were eager for a passionate, unconventional leader who made big promises. And for a time, things improved.
When he began executing his own people and invading other countries, he became the villain of history. But if we call him “evil,” then everyone else is off the hook. The comfortable narrative is that the “good people” were innocent victims—helplessly manipulated by a singularly powerful man. If that’s not a parent projection, I don’t know what is. Only children are that powerless.
But if you start with the assumption that adults are never victims, and that evil doesn’t exist—only wounded, misguided, and powerful people—the whole picture shifts. With that assumption, the masses who followed Hitler bear more responsibility than he did. Why? Because there were more of them. Because Hitler’s power was made up of their disowned power, which they gave over. Nobody can take an adult’s power–that’s victimhood.
Calling Hitler “evil” also conveniently allows us to ignore, for example, how the punitive Treaty of Versailles devastated Germany after World War I—leaving people bitter and desperate for revenge. That’s what Hitler exploited, channeling his own abusive father onto the rest of the world and using the Nazi Party to reclaim personal power he never truly attained. He famously hated being alone for his entire life.
Remember what President Bush said after 9/11? “They hate us because we’re free.” That’s the good-versus-evil dichotomy again. It’s far more complicated than that, but those who didn’t see through that childish oversimplification supported the Iraq War—now widely regarded as a colossal mistake. And yet, when the bombs began dropping, many Americans felt powerful again… for a little while.
For those with their eyes open, Trump is just another deeply insecure, power-hungry figure looking to prove himself to his father, but this isn’t easy to see for people not yet psychologically educated. You may like some of his ideas (as I do), but that’s separate from what drives him. Hitler built the Autobahn, remember?
But hating Trump—or anyone—is more than just a waste of time. It perpetuates the victim cycle. Tens of millions of Americans don’t see Trump’s insecurity because they don’t see their own. They can’t take responsibility for themselves, so they’re easily manipulated by a common enemy and a false sense of strength. They fear change, so they’re drawn to vague promises of making things “great again.” And they lack critical thinking, so they don’t notice the contradictions, legislative missteps, or outright illegal activities.
And then we have the other side, the Democratic leaders who play victim to Trump’s administration without squarely looking at their contribution to losing the election: letting Biden run when he obviously was losing his mind until he went into “word-salad mode” during a live presidential debate, not holding a proper primary, Harris not doing interviews soon enough, how they drove voters to the right with wokism, losing touch with the working class, etc.
The people who participate in identity politics, lack critical thinking, and need pandering authority figures to feel empowered are the ones who need help. The manipulative leaders are a lost cause as they are much harder to change.
Is Trump a threat to democracy? I don’t see that—not yet, anyway, except in how he helps reveal how ineffective democracy is. The judicial branch so far keeps him in check, even though it has a republican-appointed majority. Agencies are unfiring some of his overstepped terminations. He doesn’t use the military as his personal muscle. And frankly, he’s more interested in playing golf than working hard. Calling him a “threat to democracy” is sensationalized name-calling just as calling him evil is—a lazy narrative that avoids a deeper reckoning.
Democracy is what put him in office, remember? Hyperbole only makes things worse—like calling the January 6th riot an “insurrection” when it legally wasn’t. Trump pardoning the rioters was a distorted reality, but the overly harsh sentences were just as distorted.
And so the pendulum swings. Left to right. Right to left. Both sides fixated on poorly framed questions—each believing in their own take on reality, rather than curious about what they’re missing.
This happens in politics because it happens in individuals. People trade one addiction for another instead of addressing the root issue. They take weight-loss pills instead of facing their emotional eating. They tell themselves, “You can’t really do what you love” instead of taking the risk to pursue their dreams. This suffering makes them desperate for a savior—so when the next charismatic con artist comes around, they buy in. And the cycle continues.
Here’s the real lesson: No one is coming to save you.
Not Trump. Not Harris. No party. No policy or tax change will make a meaningful difference in your life–not as meaningful as what change you could make yourself.
The solution isn’t outside of you. Real leaders help you accept that. Fake leaders tell you it’s someone else’s fault and all the things they’ll do for you. Real leaders don’t seek to merely represent you, because that assumes you’re already perfect as you are, and no one is.
That’s another parent projection: the desire for unconditional love and acceptance from a leader. Real leaders accept you where you are and challenge you to grow in order to solve your own problems. They don’t tell you’re fine as you are and everything will be okay if you give me your power and I’ll disappear your college debt or reduce the price of eggs (both of which are not actually the purview of the president).
Right now, the U.S. is largely split into two groups: those who believe in the red package and those who believe in the blue package. But both are bundles of false hope, distortions, and enabling lies designed to keep you from becoming a leader of your own life.
And that’s what I assert you’re actually here for.
Not to be happy.
Because believing that sets you up as a victim to anything that impedes it—and makes you easy to manipulate.
Do you want to become more knowledgeable, skilled, aware, and get the results that come with it? I’m currently taking requests for Spring 2025 course topics.
What do you want for yourself?
Or: complain about how the chips are stacked against you and see how that goes. You have the power to choose that path, too.
Rooting for the collapse of both major parties and available for a think-tank to redesign government,
Josef