Hapless Fools

An autocratic turn rarely needs a mastermind. It grows in the fog between ambition and incompetence — statistical drift, not Machiavellian design. Greedy arrogance saturates every tier of (pretty much every) bureaucratic administration, but the deeper engine and self-propagating rationale is ashen banality: people who mistake obedience for insight, who follow momentum because they cannot see its source. Power accumulates around these gaps in understanding. Autocracy arrives not as a plot, but as a vacuum filled by gormless sycophants carried along by currents they neither comprehend nor command.