Tyranny emerges when personal propensity, institutional opportunity, and coalition viability exceed a critical threshold, making it a predictable systemic event rather than a moral failing.
Absolute power creates feedback loops that corrupt leaders psychologically and erode institutions, leading to inevitable regime collapse upon the leader’s death.
Coalition viability is the most fragile variable, maintained through repression and spoils, but susceptible to cascading failures during crises.
Tyranny exists on a spectrum of severity, with balanced regimes achieving the highest stability and deadliest outcomes.
Preventing tyranny requires engineering institutional resilience and screening high-risk leaders to keep the threshold unbreachable.
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