"And a tyranny does just that: structures your life for you," notes Russian poet Joseph Brodsky (May 24, 1940 - January 28, 1996) in his 1986 essay on the 20th-century industrialization of tyranny. What was it they said about Mussolini? At least the trains ran on time? Nothing is safe or supportive about living under tyranny, but there is a glimmer of appeal, however false it may be.

Brodsky continues on these perceived "strengths."

Tyranny... structures your life for you. It does this as meticulously as possible, certainly far better than a democracy does. Also, it does it for your own sake, for any display of individualism in a crowd may be harmful: first of all for the person who displays it; but one should care about those next to him as well. This is what the party-run state, with its security service, mental institutions, police, and citizens' sense of loyalty, is for. Still, all these devices are not enough: the dream is to make every man his own bureaucrat. And the day when such a dream comes true is very much in sight. For bureaucratization of individual existence starts with thinking politics, and it doesn't stop with the acquisition of a pocket calculator.

Tyranny has existed as long as societies have disproportionate means of power, but the 20th-century forms - found in almost every continent - were exceptional. A nationalized scale of tyranny was no longer the feudal-based systems of old but highly industrialized, sophisticated, and self-sustaining. They did this, Brodsky argues (echoing what George Orwell foretold in his critical novel 1984) not by automating systems but by automating - suppressing - the individual within those systems. 

Suppression ends in death: the death of German Jewish critic Walter Benjamin who fled Paris before the Nazis arrived and killed him, and Chilean poet and statesman Pablo Neruda who was more than likely poisoned by Pinochet's military regime, or the assassination of gay, socialist poet Federico García Lorca during the Spanish Civil War.

Joseph Brodsky in 1992.

Like these humans and so many more, Brodsky was just such an individual and paid dearly for it. Brodsky was born to a Jewish family in Leningrad in 1940. Before he was twenty-five, he was exiled to a prison camp in Siberia for his "social parasite" career choice of an artist. His term was shortened due to his influential supporters in the West, like W. H. Auden. But by 1972, Brodsky was "strongly advised" to leave the Soviet Union altogether. Brodsky moved to Europe, then America, where he lived and wrote until he died in 1996.

Because tyranny suppresses the individual being, the tyrant is also - perhaps unexpectedly - suppressed in favor of a robust and vertically-structured apparatus - political party or military usually - that consolidates power under a singular entity. 

People become tyrants not because they have a vocation for it, nor do they by pure chance either. If a man has such a vocation, he usually takes a shortcut and becomes a family tyrant, whereas real tyrants are known to be shy and not terribly interesting family men. The vehicle of tyranny is a political party (or military ranks, which have a structure similar to that of the party), for in order to get to the top of something you need to have something that has a vertical topography.

The result of this industrialization of a suppressive power is that a tyrant can be formed from almost any being; talent, values, skill, and resources are less consequential than the system itself. 

The average length of a good tyranny is a decade and a half, two decades at most. When it's more than that, it invariably slips into a monstrosity. Then you may get the wars or kind of grandeur that manifests itself in waging internal terror, or both. Blissfully, nature takes its toll, resorting at times to the hands of the rivals just in time; that is, before your man decides to immortalize himself by doing something horrendous. The younger cadres, who are not so young anyway, press from below, pushing him into the blue yonder of pure Chronos.

A tyrant may die, but another tyrant is always waiting in the wings.

The funniest thing of all, however, is the realisation any one of these men can become a tyrant. That's what all this uncertainty and confusion is just that the supply exceeds the demand. That we are dealing not with tyranny of an individual but with the tyranny of a party that simply has put the production of tyrants on an industrial footing. This was very shrewd of this party in general and apt in particular, considering the rapid surrender of individualism. In other words, today the "who-is-going-to-be-who" guessing game is as romantic and antiquated as that of bilboquet, and only freely elected people can indulge in playing it. The time is long since over for the aquiline profiles, goatees or shovel-like beards, walrus, or toothbrush mustaches; soon it will be over even for eyebrows.

A state apparatus might bring the tyrant into position and keeps him there as long as he acts in the manner that got him to the pinnacle in the first place. The tyrant maintains the power under a legacy of fear and ally-building with those who equate the tyrant with the position, or who fail to see the danger of the system because of the appeal of the tyrant.

"You are bound to come into direct physical contact with what's known as Evil," Brodsky warned us in his speech on the social reality of evil delivered two years before his essay on tyranny.

The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even if you will eccentricity, that is, something that can't be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned impostor couldn't be happy with. Something, in other words, that can't be shared, like your own skin: not even by a minority. Evil is a sucker for solidity. It always goes for big numbers, for confident granite, for ideological purity, for drilled armies and balanced sheets. Its proclivity for such things has to do presumably with its innate insecurity, but this realization, again, is of small comfort when Evil triumphs.
From Joseph Brodsky's A Commencement Address

Accompany Brodsky's call for individualism and freedom of expression with George Orwell, who spent his early writing years observing the poor of Paris and London and admitted his writing came from a sense of injustice, or political philosopher Simone Weil who maintained that our most significant human freedom was to embrace a sense of "I," and Elie Wiesel on ways we carry and protect memory when collective consciousness weakens.

Brodsky was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987 "for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity." His high intelligence and sensitivity to humanity will stand the test of our collective memory loss as we move forward and forget our near past, or worse, turn it into glib political insults.