Tyranny With Rights

There’s a phrase that’s been rattling around in my head: Tyranny with Rights. It’s how I would describe the system most of us in the West are actually living under — as opposed to what we were taught we lived under, and in contrast to how we were taught that the rest of the world lives in a state of tyranny without rights.

The story we tell ourselves

Most of us in the West grew up with some simple ideas instilled in our heads that makes us feel better than the Rest:

We live in the so-called free world (us) and everyone else lives in unfree countries (them). The world is divided into democracies and dictatorships. We have rights and the Rest are oppressed.

This isn’t entirely wrong. But it’s incomplete in ways that matter profoundly.

In the West we have the ability and permission to criticize the government. This is real. The right to a fair trial is real (if you can afford a good lawyer.) Freedom of the press is real (if you don’t mind that the press is managed and owned by corporations that serve the interests of the corporate state.)

But ask the question: free to do what, exactly? Free to vote between two parties both funded by the same billionaire donor class? Free to protest in a designated zone while the policy you are protesting passes anyway?

The Eastern Mirror: Tyranny Without Rights

In China, Steven Chen, a Chinese lawyer, activist, and citizen journalist went missing on February 6, 2020 after reporting on the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, and did not reappear until a year and half later. He covered the 2019–20 Hong Kong protests and the COVID-19 pandemic which included criticism of the government response. He posted on Twitter: “Over the past year and eight months, I have experienced a lot of things. Some of it can be talked about, some of it can’t, I believe you understand.”

China doesn’t bother hiding what it’s doing. The West is more subtle but the message is the same. An American journalist who exposed government corruption — think of what happened to Julian Assange — faced a different but still very real kind of destruction. The methods differ. The message is similar: there are limits.

The East and the West are not the same — and that matters enormously to anyone living under either system.

The point is that both systems involve concentrated power serving elite interests. The difference is what comes with it. In the West you get rights alongside the domination. In the East you get the domination without the rights. The rights are real and valuable — ask any dissident who lost them. But they don’t change the fundamental question of who actually runs things and the fact that the average person has zero political capital.

What Tyranny Looks Like When It Wears a Suit

Power doesn’t need Nazis anymore.

That’s the thing they don’t tell you. The image most of us carry of tyranny is dramatic — secret police, midnight arrests, dissidents disappearing into unmarked vans. And that version exists. But it’s not the version most relevant to people living in Western democracies in 2025. Our version is quieter, more comfortable, and in some ways harder to resist precisely because it’s so difficult to point at.

Modern Western power doesn’t rule through fear. It rules through management.

Think about how your political reality is actually constructed. You’re not told what to think — that would be too obvious, too Soviet. Instead you’re given a menu. Two parties, or three, each representing slightly different flavors of a consensus that was decided before you entered the voting booth. The range of genuine policy options available to you through electoral politics is narrow in ways that have nothing to do with what’s technically possible or what the majority of people actually want.

Consider healthcare. For decades, consistent majorities of Americans — somewhere between sixty and seventy percent depending on the poll — have supported some form of universal healthcare. It has never seriously advanced through the legislative process. The money arrayed against it — from insurance companies, pharmaceutical corporations, and the politicians whose campaigns they fund — has been more politically decisive than the sustained preferences of the majority of the population. This is not a failure of democracy. It is democracy functioning exactly as currently designed, which is the more uncomfortable thought.

Or consider 2008.

The American financial system collapsed under the weight of its own fraud. Mortgage-backed securities, knowingly sold as safe investments while internally described by the bankers selling them in terms that cannot be reprinted in a family publication, wiped out the savings and homes of millions of ordinary people. The architects of this fraud were not prosecuted. They were bailed out — to the tune of several trillion dollars of public money — and within a few years were paying themselves record bonuses again. One senior banker went to prison. His name was Kareem Serageldin, and he was a mid-level trader at Credit Suisse. The executives who designed and approved the systems that caused the collapse returned to their offices, their clubs, and their philanthropic galas. Good times.

In the same period, approximately ten million American families lost their homes.

This is not ancient history. Most people reading this lived through it, and remember feeling helpless and angry — the feeling of watching something obviously, flagrantly wrong happen in full public view, while the mechanisms that were supposed to prevent it either looked away, or actively facilitated it.

Now ask yourself: what is the word for a system in which the people nominally in charge of making decisions serve the interests of a small financial class, rather than the majority of the population, and in which the legal system is applied with full force to the powerless, while the powerful operate with effective immunity?

The most accurate definition is plutocracy. A plutocracy is a system of government in which power is held or controlled by people of great wealth or income. While leaders may be elected or formally accountable, their policies and actions disproportionately favour the wealthy class that supports them financially or socially.

Another word is tyranny. We just don’t use it because the image doesn’t match — no uniforms, no rallies, no cult of personality. Just men in expensive suits making decisions in rooms you’ll never enter, about systems you can’t meaningfully vote on, with consequences that will shape your life whether you consent or not.

The cage, in other words, isn’t made of bars.

It’s made of debt — student loans that mortgage your twenties before you’ve had a chance to develop a political consciousness independent of your economic anxiety. It’s made of distraction — an entertainment ecosystem of extraordinary sophistication and indulgence that also happens to consume the hours that previous generations spent in union halls, civic organizations, and political clubs.
It’s made of the destruction of the precariat working class — the escalating homelessness and cost of living crisis.
It’s made of drugs that numb the population into political apathy. America is the undisputed king of consumption of illegal drugs. The dirty little secret of the Mexican cartel drug wars is that they are fuelled by Americans who keep buying illegal drugs.

Facts.

The rights remain. You can write this article. You can vote. You can protest, within designated parameters. You can sue, if you can afford to. You can read leaked documents, access court filings, follow the money through public records. The infrastructure of rights is real and its value is not nothing — ask anyone who has lived without it.

But the rights exist within a system whose fundamental power structures we do not and cannot touch. You are free to say almost anything. The question is whether saying it changes anything. You are free to vote. The question is whether the realistic options on the ballot represent a genuine choice about who actually governs. You are free to know, in considerable detail, how the system works. The question is whether knowing is the same as having power over it.

Tyranny with Rights means the rights are genuine and the tyranny is genuine and both are true simultaneously.

That is harder to hold in your head than a simple story about freedom or a simple story about oppression. But it is the accurate description of where we live. And accurate description is, as any writer knows, the necessary first step toward anything resembling change.

Prince Andrew: The Sacrificial Lamb

If everything above still feels too surreal, consider Jeffrey Epstein.

He ran a sophisticated child trafficking operation for decades, his social and client network included presidents, prime ministers, princes, billionaires, and some of the most celebrated scientists and media figures of our era. His first prosecution in 2005 gave new meaning to the phrase Club Fed: He did thirteen months in a private wing of a county jail with work release privileges — a deal negotiated by a federal prosecutor who later testified that Epstein "belonged to intelligence" and to leave it alone.

His second arrest in 2019, which threatened to expose his full network, ended with his death in a maximum security federal facility while on suicide watch, with two surveillance cameras malfunctioning simultaneously and two guards asleep at their posts.

Thousands of documents have since been released. The flight logs exist. The black book exists. The testimony exists. The names in those documents read like the guest list of Davos crossed with a royal garden party. The total number of additional prosecutions resulting from all of this evidence: ZERO.

And they all repeat the same mantra: “I never went to Epstein’s Island, and when I did, there were no underage girls there… I had no idea Epstein was such a douchebag etc”

One prominent figure has faced real consequences — Prince Andrew, a British royal, sufficiently foreign to American power to be sacrificed and sufficiently eccentric to be politically expendable. In a country without rights, Epstein is never arrested at all. In a country with genuine accountability, the people in those flight logs face consequences. What we got was the middle option — enough process to look legitimate, not enough to threaten anyone with real power — that is Tyranny with Rights.

Where It’s Heading

Rights are not permanent. They exist to protect the people from the State. The State has no need of rights so it is up to the people to enforce their rights upon the State.

Our freedoms and rights are being quietly eroded, through mass surveillance, emergency powers that never get rolled back, the privatization of censorship through social media platforms, and financial systems that can exclude you without due process. The trajectory is toward a system that keeps the language of rights while hollowing out their substance.

In Canada, Prime Minister Trudeau invoked emergency powers to freeze the bank accounts of truckers' protest participants without judicial process — no charges, no trial, no court order. The accounts were unfrozen when the protest ended. The precedent remained.

If Orwell were alive today, he would need to write a sequel to 1984—call it 2044. It would be about a technologically advanced society that had stock phrases like:

Technology is freedom. The media loves you. Billionaires are perfect.

In the East there is Tyranny without rights, but in the West we have Tyranny with rights. And though it is true that what we have in the West is genuinely better than the alternative, it is still genuinely not good enough. Tyranny with Rights. It’s where we live. Knowing that seems like the minimum requirement for changing it.