When Power Meant Something

There was a time when power didn’t need a camera. It was absolute—terrible, unfiltered. Nero had his own mother killed. Caligula demanded worship as a living god. Commodus fought slaves in the arena to prove his divinity. To displease these men was to vanish. No debate. No committee. Just blood and silence.

They were monsters, yes—but monsters of conviction. Their cruelty was not performative. It was naked, self-assured, real. They didn’t tweet about empathy while starving provinces; they simply declared famine a policy.

Modern politicians, by contrast, are bureaucrats of illusion. Their cruelty is outsourced, digitized, polite. They destroy livelihoods with legislation, not blades. They wage wars through signatures, not swords. They bow not to gods but to optics.

We live under rulers who fear ridicule more than rebellion. They govern by avoiding offense, by pretending weakness is mercy. But what we call “progress” has often only made the powerful more cowardly.

The emperors of Rome would have found them amusing—men who build nothing, burn nothing, and still call themselves leaders.

Perhaps that’s the real horror of modernity: not that our leaders are cruel, but that they’re small.

— RF