Despotism is an unrestricted right to arbitrariness

Studying history in a school or a higher educational institution, each student encounters in various sources the references to the extremely cruel rulers who, when the peaks of power and power reached the apexes, methods incompatible with the notion of humanity. The extermination of whole nations, the execution of enemies and their insidious murder, imprisonment of possible competitors in the dungeons and other ways of strengthening the dictatorship were not uncommon in biblical times, in the Middle Ages, and in centuries considered more enlightened. Despots and tyrants have always lived, only the scale of crimes and the ways of committing them differed.

Despots of antiquity

Thus, the ancient Jewish king Herod the Great, who had become famous earlier for large-scale construction projects and fighting hunger, ordered the extermination of all babies in order to secure his dictatorship from a possible threat (the Gospel of Matthew).

Despotism is a form of government in which the will of the ruler is not limited to laws that regulate the life of all other members of society. Since the pursuit of justice lies in the very nature of man, the establishment of one-man power requires certain efforts and is accompanied by acts of cruelty, which are frank and demonstrative. Only the use of mass terror is capable of some, sometimes prolonged, time to inspire the people with the idea of futility of resistance.

There are other methods by which despotism was traditionally established. This is the creation of the public illusions about the divine origin and extraordinary abilities (personal qualities) of the ruler. For this, for example, in ancient Egypt, the pharaohs, using the knowledge of the priests who were at that time "scientific elite", gave out natural phenomena for the manifestation of their own supernatural power.

There is an opinion about the special sophistication that distinguished eastern despotism. The totalitarianism of the Sumerian rulers, the kings of Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, the states of Mesopotamia, ancient China laid the foundation for the traditions followed by the dictators of subsequent centuries. Moreover, the laws on which the society was supposed to live were written, and the Hammurabi code became the prototype of the legal norms of the present. Observance of them was mandatory for all, the violation was severely punished, and the exception was the divine ruler.

Gloomy Middle Ages

The Ottoman Empire became a medieval state, in which feudal despotism reached its apogee. This happened during the XIV-XVI centuries.

In Russia in the same XVI century, his tyrant, Ivan IV, nicknamed the Terrible, ruled. He acted no less terrible methods, strengthening individual power, although the number of victims of his rule (about 3 thousand people executed for various faults and simply because of their disagreement) is much inferior to the "achievements" of contemporary European rulers. For example, during the night of St. Bartholomew by order of Charles IX, 30,000 Huguenots were put to death. In Britain, Henry VIII, a third of the population was executed for vagrancy.

High price for progress?

It is interesting that despotism is such an era when, at the cost of incredible victims, a society driven by fear makes a breakthrough in its development, sometimes revolutionary. Most people live in times of "big fractures" extremely uncomfortable, but the results are sometimes impressive, if, of course, the transformations are made in the right direction. Otherwise, the country has to spend a lot of energy in order to return to its starting point from the impasse in which it was led by the unlucky dictator.

A little bit about everyday tyrants

However, tyranny and despotism are not always political phenomena, they are found both in work collectives and in families. Dictator inclinations are inherent in some leaders, husbands, wives, and sometimes children. Despots arise when innate traits of character are combined with appropriate upbringing and are backed by universal indulgence. And then the punishment is waiting for everyone who does something wrong, how you want a tyrant.