I read On Tyranny by Timothy D. Snyder on Jun 8th, 2026

The author, Timothy Snyder is a historian specializing the Holocaust, Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc. He looked at the reality through the historian lens, and presented us 20 lesson learned in the 20th century:

1. Do Not Obey in Advance
2. Defend Institutions
3. Beware of the One-Party State
4. Take Responsibility for the Face of the World
5. Remember Professional Ethics
6. Be Wary of Paramilitaries
7. Be Reflective if You Must Be Armed
8. Stand Out
9. Be Kind to Our Language
10. Believe in Truth
11. Investigate
12. Make Eye Contact and Small Talk
13. Practice Corporal Politics
14. Establish a Private Life
15. Contribute to Good Causes
16. Learn from Peers in Other Countries
17. Listen for Dangerous Words
18. Be Calm When the Unthinkable Arrives
19. Be Patriot
20. Be as Courageous as You Can

This resonated what I learned from the The Narrow Corridor: the democracy walk along the narrow corridor with delicate power balance of the society against the state. I would categorize these lessons into four buckets:

Self Improvement

We can build the society muscle from each individuals. Be wary about the erosion of civil rights and privacy, like Pastor Martin Niemöller put it in First they came:

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

The oppression may be justified under the cloak of nationalism, the victims might be painted as extremists, traitors. Courage is a deeply underrated virtual for human beings. It is OK for us to fear the Leviathan. If we don’t have the courage to walk to the street to protest, we can cheer from the sidelines. If we dare not to refuse an unlawful order, we can aim the riffle one inch higher.

I want to callout #14. Establish a Private Life. With ubiquitous surveillance and highly consolidated social network, it is challenging to maintain anonymous in the cyberspace. A clear boundary of the private life and social identity is the first defense of the privacy.

Freedom of speech

The freedom of speech is the foundation of democracy which provides the checks and accountability of power. The truth is the cornerstone of the scrutinizing the power. Truth dies in four modes:

1. Open hostility to the verifiable reality, such as the denial of 2020 election results.
2. Shamanistic incantation, like Sleepy Joe
3. Open embrace of contradictions, such as tax cut will not increase the national debt.
4. Misplaced faith, such as “I alone can solve it”.

In #9, the author recommended the following books:

• Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov
• Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• Sinclair Lewis’s novel It Can’t Happen Here
• Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America
• J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
• Politics and the English Language by George Orwell (1946)
• The Language of the Third Reich by Victor Klemperer (1947)
• The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt (1951)
• The Rebel by Albert Camus (1951)
• The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz (1953)
• The Power of the Powerless by Václav Havel (1978)
• How to Be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist by Leszek Kołakowski (1978)
• The Uses of Adversity by Timothy Garton Ash (1989)
• The Burden of Responsibility by Tony Judt (1998)
• Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning (1992)
• Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev (2014)

Besides the typical linguistic corruption, such as layoff is euphemized as graduation, recession is replaced by the negative growth; we also need to pay attention to the lost translation. For example, hegemony is translated to baquan(霸权), which implies the dominance is coerced by the military and political forces. The dollar hegemony, aka 美元霸权 paints the global monetary policy as an economic bully endorsed by carrier strike groups.

Build the community

The totalitarian regimes systematically breakdown the the traditional bonds, atomize, and intimidate the individuals politically. As Hannah Arendt pointed out, an atomized society was highly vulnerable to totalitarian movements.

In the AI era, it is dangerous for us to indulge in the comfort zone created by the AI, hallucinating the intimacy with AI. This would strip away the real-world trust and compromise our capability to bond with the community.

Defend the institution

The democracy institution is not unbreakable. It took less than one year for Nazi to consolidate power by ostensibly legal means. In roughly six months, DOGE had done serious harm to the workings of federal government. The loss of senior staff in the State Department’s Bureau of Energy Resources cripple the administration capability to assess the energy turmoil caused by the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz.

Closing remarks

The democracy is endangered in the global scale as populist leader rise and entrench their power. We might learn some lessons from the history, as the author stated in the Prologue:

History does not repeat, but it does instruct.