“On Tyranny” - Chapter 20: “Be as courageous as you can”
“If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, all of us will die under tyranny.” Snyder frames this last chapter as an epilogue, “history and Liberty.” He leads off with Hamlet as an example of “a virtuous man who is rightly shocked by the abrupt rise of an evil ruler.” It’s worth letting that sink in for a while. Throughout this short text, the author has presented the case for the past as prologue but also the understanding that nothing is inevitable. This book is a guide to navigating worst-case scenarios and I feel it is all the more valuable for that. I genuinely do feel the darkest is yet to come. I believe Social security will cease to function in a matter of months, if not weeks. The economy is tanking but it’s in a slow-motion freewill. Nothing is going to happen linearly. There’s too much chaos at work for that to be the case. However, it is also the case that there is a tremendous amount of dysfunction behind the scenes. The recent Signal leak is a glaring examp...