What It's Like to be Every Level of Dictator

Level one, the local strongman. You

control a village, maybe a small town, a

few hundred people, a few thousand at

most. You rose to power through violence

or the threat of violence. Maybe you

were a militia leader during a civil

war, and when the war ended, you kept

your guns and your men. Maybe you were a

criminal who eliminated the competition

until no one was left to challenge you.

Either way, you are the law in your

territory. There is no police force

except you. There is no court except

you. When disputes arise, people come to

you for judgment, and your word is final

because your men have the rifles. You

extract tribute from everyone. The

farmers give you a portion of their

harvest. The merchants give you a cut of

their sales. In exchange, you provide

protection, or more accurately, you

refrain from destroying them. It's a

simple arrangement, ancient and brutal.

You live better than anyone else in your

territory. You have the best house, the

best food, the best women. Your men are

loyal because you feed them and pay them

and because the alternative is being on

the other side of your displeasure.

You've made examples of people who

challenged you. Everyone remembers. Your

power is absolute within your small

domain but fragile beyond it. A larger

warlord could crush you. The national

government, if there is one, could send

troops. You survive by being too small

to bother with, too remote to reach

easily, too willing to cut deals when

necessary. You're a parasite on a dying

body, feeding where you can, moving when

you must. This is not a path to

greatness, but it's a path to survival,

and sometimes that's enough. Level two,

the warlord. You command a private army,

perhaps a few thousand men, and you

control a region, a province, a stretch

of countryside, an area defined by

mountains or rivers, or simply by how

far your forces can reach. You are one

of several powers in a country too weak

to assert itself. Maybe the central

government collapsed. Maybe it never

really existed. Either way, you are the

government in your territory, and you

govern through force. Your army is not

professional in the traditional sense.

Many of your soldiers are boys with no

other options, pressed into service or

volunteering because you offer food and

purpose. You have a core of veterans,

hardened men who have been fighting

since they were children themselves, men

who know no other life. You arm them

with whatever you can buy, steal, or

capture. AK-47s mostly, maybe some

heavier weapons if you can get them. You

fight other warlords for territory, for

resources, for control of smuggling

routes or mining operations. You've

learned that economics matters.

Territory without value is just

responsibility. You seek control of what

generates money. Diamonds, gold, drugs,

timber, anything that can be exported to

buyers who don't ask questions. The

money buys weapons. The weapons secure

the territory. The territory generates

more money. It's a cycle that feeds

itself. You're not building a nation.

You're running an enterprise. The

enterprise just happens to have an army.

Level three, the revolutionary. You were

nobody once. A teacher, a lawyer, a

mid-level officer, a student. You had

ideas about how the country should be

run. And those ideas were dangerous

enough that you had to act on them or be

destroyed by them. You gathered

followers quietly at first, then openly.

You built a movement. You spoke of

justice, equality, liberation from

oppression. You meant some of it. You

told yourself you meant all of it. The

revolution succeeded. Maybe you

overthrew a colonial power. Maybe a

corrupt monarchy. Maybe a military juna

that had outlived its usefulness. You

are now the leader of a country, not

because you inherited it or conquered

it, but because you promised to remake

it. The people believed you. They

carried you to power on their shoulders.

They gave you their trust, their hope,

their lives. Now you face the

revolutionaries dilemma. The skills that

win revolutions are not the skills that

run countries. You can inspire, but can

you administer? You can destroy the old

system, but can you build a new one? The

problems of governance are not solved by

speeches. The economy needs experts. The

bureaucracy needs managers. The military

needs to transition from insurgency to

institution. You look around and realize

that many of the competent people fled

or were killed or are sitting in your

prisons. You have passion. You have

legitimacy. You may not have the ability

to deliver what you promised. Level

four, the populist. You were elected.

Technically, there was a campaign. There

were votes. There were results that were

more or less accurate. But you didn't

win by policy. You won by personality.

You won by channeling the anger of

people who felt ignored. by giving them

an enemy to blame, by promising to tear

down the elites who you said were

keeping them down. Now you're in power.

And the question is what you do with it.

You start by rewarding your supporters.

Government contracts go to your allies.

Government jobs go to your relatives and

the relatives of people who helped you

rise. This is how politics works

everywhere. But you do it openly,

brazenly, making a virtue of loyalty

over competence. Your supporters love

it. They see their own power growing

through yours. Your opponents call it

corruption, but you call it democracy.

The people voted for this. The people

voted for you. You attack the

institutions that might constrain you.

The courts are filled with elitists who

don't respect the will of the people.

The press is the enemy of the people,

spreading lies to undermine the people's

champion. The opposition is

illegitimate. Traitors who want to

betray the nation to foreign powers. You

say these things so often that your

supporters believe them. Some of them

believe them already. You just gave

voice to what they felt. You're not a

dictator yet. There are still elections,

still courts, still a constitution, but

the constraints are loosening. Each

crisis is an opportunity to claim more

power. Each success is proof that you

should have more. You're moving towards

something and you're not sure where it

ends. Maybe you'll step aside when your

term expires. Maybe you won't. Level

five, the military coup leader. You were

a general or maybe a colonel when you

decided that the civilians had failed.

The economy was collapsing. The country

was losing a war. Corruption was

everywhere. Someone had to act. So you

did. Tanks in the streets, soldiers at

the television station, the president

escorted from the palace at gunpoint or

fleeing ahead of the troops or shot in a

basement. Either way, he's gone and

you're in charge. You promised the coup

would be temporary. You said you were

saving the country from chaos, that you

would restore order and then return to

civilian rule. Maybe you meant it at the

time. But order is hard to maintain and

civilian politicians are incompetent.

And every time you think about handing

over power, you see the problems that

would follow. The country needs

stability. The country needs a strong

hand. The country needs you. You govern

through decree. The parliament is

suspended or rubber stamps, whatever you

decide or doesn't exist anymore. Your

cabinet is filled with other officers,

men who understand loyalty and

discipline, men who won't leak to the

press or demand debate about every

decision. The economy is managed like an

army. Commands from the top, execution

below, punishment for failure. It's

efficient in a way. It's also brittle.

When something goes wrong, there's no

one to blame but you. You keep the

senior officers happy with positions and

privileges. You keep the junior officers

nervous with transfers and surveillance.

A coup leader's greatest fear is another

coup. The men who helped you rise know

exactly how it's done. You spend as much

time watching your own people as

watching your enemies. Level six, the

one party ruler. You control the party

and the party controls the country. This

is the communist model, the fascist

model, the model of any regime that

maintains a facade of ideology while

concentrating power in the hands of a

few. There are elections sometimes, but

only one party is allowed to win. There

is debate, but only within limits set by

the party. There is a constitution, but

the party can rewrite it whenever

convenient. The party is both your power

and your constraint. You rose through

its ranks by demonstrating loyalty,

competence, and ruthlessness. You

outmaneuvered rivals, formed alliances,

and waited for the old guard to die or

be purged. Now you sit at the top, but

you are not alone. The party has

factions, interests, institutions. You

cannot rule entirely alone because the

party would turn on you. You cannot be

challenged because you control enough of

the party to crush disscent. It's a

balance maintained through constant

negotiation and occasional violence. The

advantage of one party rule is

stability. No elections to lose, no

peaceful transfers of power, no

uncertainty about who comes next. The

successor will emerge from the party

through a process that is opaque to

outsiders but follows its own internal

logic. The disadvantage is oification.

The party rewards loyalty over

innovation. Problems are covered up

rather than solved. Bad news doesn't

reach the top because bringing bad news

is career suicide. You make decisions

based on reports that are shaped to tell

you what people think you want to hear.

You are informed and ignorant at the

same time. Level seven, the president

for life. You were elected once or maybe

a few times. But elections are

inconvenient. They require campaigning.

They produce uncertainty. They create

the possibility, however small, that you

might lose. So you changed the

constitution. Term limits were removed.

The electoral commission is staffed with

your people. Opposition parties exist

but are harassed, funded poorly, denied

media access. The elections still happen

on schedule with international observers

sometimes. But everyone knows the

outcome before the first vote is cast.

You've been in power for 15 years now,

or 20 or 30. You've seen everything.

You've survived coup attempts,

assassination plots, economic crisis,

international isolation. You're still

here. You'll always be here. You've

started to believe the country and you

have become the same thing. When people

love the country, they love you. When

they criticize you, they betray the

country. This is an ego. This is simply

how it is. Your image is everywhere.

Posters, statues, the name of the

airport, the face on the money. Children

sing songs about you in school. Your

birthday is a national holiday.

Journalists compete to praise you more

fervently than their rivals. You know,

much of it is theater, but the theater

has its own reality. People who say they

love you long enough start to believe

it, or at least can't remember what it

felt like not to. You've shaped reality

with repetition. Level eight, the

kleptocrat. You came to power by some

method or another. It doesn't really

matter which. What matters is what

you've done since. You've stolen

everything. The oil revenues, the mining

licenses, the foreign aid, the public

lands. Everything of value flows through

companies you control or your family

controls or your friends control with

the understanding that they give you a

cut. You are not governing a country.

You are looting it. Your personal wealth

is measured in billions, not millions.

Billions. You have properties in London,

apartments in New York, yachts

registered in Malta, bank accounts in

Switzerland. Your children were educated

at the best universities in the West.

Your wife wears jewelry that could feed

your capital city for a year. This

obscene wealth is visible, known,

discussed openly in foreign newspapers.

In your country, discussing it is

dangerous. The journalist who

investigated your family's holdings fell

down a staircase. The activist who

organized protests about corruption left

the country one step ahead of arrest and

never came back. You justify it when you

bother to justify anything by saying

that everyone steals. The difference

between you and the small-time grafters

is scale, not kind. At least you provide

stability. At least the country

functions more or less. At least there's

no civil war, no famine, no total

collapse. You're a parasite, but a

manageable one. The host survives,

weakened, but alive. It could be worse.

You make sure people know it could be

worse. Level nine, the totalitarian. You

control not just the government, but the

society. The economy is planned by the

state, which means by you. The media is

owned by the state, which means by you.

The schools teach what you approve. The

churches preach what you allow. There

are no private spaces, no apolitical

activities, no parts of life that are

not in some way shaped by your will.

This is total power. This is what all

dictators dream of and few achieve. The

apparatus is vast. Secret police who spy

on citizens and each other. Informers in

every workplace, every apartment

building, every family. files on

everyone, recording their statements,

their associations, their suspected

thoughts. The population lives in fear,

but also in numbness. Fear becomes

normal. Surveillance becomes invisible.

People adjust. They learn what not to

say, what not to think, what not to

want. The totalitarian system doesn't

just control bodies. It reshapes minds.

The cost is enormous. Maintaining total

control requires total resources. Your

security services are larger than your

army. Your prisons are full. Your

economy is distorted by the need to keep

everyone employed and supervised.

Innovation is crushed because innovation

requires freedom to experiment, freedom

to fail, freedom to think differently.

Your country falls behind yearbyear

while the rest of the world advances.

But you don't care about the rest of the

world. You care about control. You have

that. Everything else is secondary.

Level 10, the cult leader. You are not

merely a president or a general. You are

something approaching a god. Your

official titles include words like

eternal, supreme, father. Your biography

is mythology filled with miracles and

supernatural achievements. You invented

things. You set world records. You

predicted the future. You commune with

forces that ordinary mortals cannot

perceive. The people don't just obey

you, they worship you. This is not

entirely self-generated. You've worked

hard to create this image, investing

resources that could have fed millions

into propaganda that deifies you

instead. But after decades, it's taken

on a life of its own. Children who grew

up knowing nothing else believe it

sincerely. Adults who remember the

before times pretend to believe and then

forget they're pretending. The cult of

personality has become the cult, actual

and literal. Criticizing you is not just

a political crime. It's blasphemy. The

danger of becoming a god is that gods

cannot be wrong. When the harvest fails,

it cannot be your fault. Someone must

have sabotaged. When the war goes badly,

it cannot be your strategy. Traitors

must have betrayed. You are surrounded

by people who tell you only what you

want to hear. Not because they're trying

to deceive you, but because reality

itself must conform to your

infallibility. You live in a bubble of

delusion, making decisions based on

fantasy. And your country pays the

price. But you never see the bill. You

see only the worship. Level 11, the

monster. You have crossed the line from

dictatorship to atrocity. You are no

longer content to rule, to steal, to

control. You have decided that certain

categories of people should not exist.

Maybe it's an ethnic group. Maybe it's a

political class. Maybe it's anyone who

you've decided is an enemy. You have

ordered their elimination, not their

suppression or their exile, but their

physical destruction. You have built the

camps. You have signed the orders. You

have created the machinery of mass

death. History will remember you as one

of the worst humans who ever lived. Your

name will be spoken with Hitler, Stalin,

Pulp Pot. School children will study

your crimes in disbelief. Museums will

preserve the evidence. Survivors will

testify until there are no survivors

left. You have achieved a kind of

immortality, the darkest kind. You will

never be forgotten, but only because you

cannot be forgiven. You probably don't

see yourself this way. You probably have

a rationale. They were enemies of the

state. They were subhuman. They were in

the way of progress. The ideology

matters less than the outcome. Millions

are dead. They died because you decided

they should die. And you had the power

to make it happen. That's what absolute

power enables. Not just corruption,

extermination. Level 12. The legacy. You

are dead now. Or maybe you're still

alive. An old man in a palace surrounded

by portraits of yourself in your prime.

Waiting for the end that you once

thought would never come. But your death

is the least interesting thing about you

now. What matters is what remains. Your

country will spend decades recovering or

trying to. The institutions you

destroyed don't rebuild themselves. The

people you killed don't come back. The

trauma echoes through generations. Your

successors, whether they continue your

system or try to dismantle it, will work

in your shadow. Everything they do will

be measured against you. Some will try

to be the opposite of what you were.

Some will quietly preserve more than

they admit. The shape you gave the

country will persist long after your

body is dust. And somewhere right now,

another ambitious person is watching,

learning, thinking that they could do it

better. The path to dictatorship is not

closed. It never closes. Every

generation produces people who believe

they deserve absolute power and are

willing to do whatever it takes to get

it. Some will succeed. Most will fail.

But the template exists. You helped

create it. That's your true legacy. Not

the palaces or the statues or the body

counts. The knowledge that it can be

done, the example that others will

follow. The cycle continues. The

dictator's path is not one thing. It's a

ladder and the rungs are made of

different materials. Some climb by

ideology, believing they're saving their

people from enemies, real or imagined.

Some climb by greed, caring only about

wealth and the power to acquire more.

Some climb by accident, swept up in

events they set in motion but couldn't

control. A few are genuinely monsters

from the start, drawn to power because

it enables their darkest impulses. But

most start as something else. Teachers,

officers, lawyers, true believers. They

become what they become through choices.

Each one seeming reasonable at the time.

Each one making the next one easier. The

first kill is hard. You remember it

forever. The first opponent you had

imprisoned. The first order you gave

that ended a life. The first time you

crossed the line you said you'd never

cross. It keeps you up at night. You

question yourself. You wonder if there

was another way. But then the second is

easier. The third is routine. By the

hundth, you don't think about it at all.

The human mind adapts to anything, even

atrocity. Especially atrocity. The

people who carry out your orders adapt

too. They become functionaries of death,

punching the clock, filling the quotas,

going home to their families. This is

how genocide happens. Not through

demons, but through adaptation. Every

dictator believes the rules don't apply

to them. That's the core of it. The

rules are for other people, for ordinary

people, for people who lack vision or

courage or destiny. You are different.

You see what others cannot see. You can

do what others cannot do. You have been

chosen by God or history or the people

to lead. The rules constrain the chosen.

They prevent greatness. They must be

broken for the greater good, for the

nation, for the future. This is what you

tell yourself. This is what the people

around you tell you. Because telling you

otherwise is dangerous. The end comes

for all of them. Some die in bed,

surrounded by family and servants,

having escaped all consequences for a

lifetime of crime. Some are overthrown,

dragged from bunkers or palaces,

executed by the people they oppressed or

by rivals who want their seat. Some flee

into exile, spending their remaining

years in villas purchased with stolen

money, writing memoirs that no one

believes. Some are tried in

international courts, sitting in glass

boxes while lawyers recite their crimes,

reduced from world historical figures to

frail old men in headphones. None of

them think they deserved it. None of

them think they did anything wrong. The

capacity for self-justification is

infinite. But here's the truth that

dictators never understand. The power

was never real. Not in the way they

thought. It was borrowed from the people

who followed them, who obeyed them, who

chose not to resist. The moment enough

people decide to stop obeying, the power

evaporates. The secret police can't

arrest everyone, the army can't shoot

everyone. The informers can't watch

everyone. The system is held together by

the belief that it's held together. When

that belief breaks, it breaks fast.

Chowoescu was still giving speeches when

the crowd started booing. Within days,

he was dead against a wall. The

transition from absolute power to

absolute powerlessness can happen

between breakfast and lunch. And yet,

they keep coming. The dictators, the

would-be dictators, the men and

occasionally women who look at absolute

power and see opportunity rather than

warning. They read the histories and

think they'll be different. They won't

make the same mistakes. They won't

become what the others became. They're

smarter, more virtuous, more

historically aware. They climb the

ladder anyway, rung by rung, choice by

choice. And by the time they reach the

top, they're exactly what everyone

becomes up there. Alone, paranoid,

surrounded by sick offense, unable to

trust anyone, unable to leave, trapped

by the very power they sought. That's

the final lesson. Dictatorship is a

prison with the dictator locked