A MILLION SOLITUDES

The image is exact. A tyrant is not just a person with too much power. A tyrant is a person whose voice is the only voice. Below him stretches a vast space, populated by individuals each in his own solitude, none of them speaking to each other, none of them speaking back. The tyrant addresses them all from above. They listen.

What tyranny destroys first is not the body but the conversation. People stop talking to their neighbors about what they think. They lose the small daily exchanges through which they would have discovered they were not alone in their doubts. The monologue from above replaces every dialogue below. By the time the system is fully built, each person is convinced that he is the only one who sees clearly and that everyone else has been persuaded. So he stays quiet.

Camus saw this pattern in the totalitarianisms of his century, but he understood it as a universal risk. Any setting in which one voice dominates and silences exchange begins to take this shape. Workplaces. Families. Friendships. Even the inner life of a single person can be tyrannized by a single dominant voice that crowds out the others.

The first move against tyranny is small and not heroic. It is to speak with one other person about what you actually see. The million solitudes end when two of them begin to compare notes.

See also: The widening self (May 8), Two and two (May 19)