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“He was depressed when he suddenly realized that everything had finally fallen into place in the world… everything except him… he alone no longer had a place.”
– Gabriel García Márquez, The Autumn of the Patriarch
This is not merely a literary moment drawn from a novel. It expresses a political and human experience that recurs throughout history: the moment when power ceases to be a function and becomes an illusion of existence.
At the moment of his fall, the tyrant - indeed, every tyrant - does not simply lose power. He is confronted with something far more unsettling: the world he believed revolved around him has continued without him. History, it turns out, was never waiting for his arrival.
This marks the final collapse of a foundational illusion: the belief that a single individual can embody an entire nation.
While these reflections emerge from the experience of authoritarian power in the Arab world, they point to a broader understanding of how tyranny operates beyond any single geography or context.
Power as a Monopoly of Meaning
Tyranny is not only the monopoly of power. It is also the monopoly of meaning.
The tyrant’s way of thinking is not formed alone. It is shaped by a controlled environment: a media system that repeats and amplifies his image, an entourage that filters reality to please authority, and networks of political, economic, and personal interests that value proximity to power more than truth.
In such a system, the ruler no longer sees society as it is. He receives only a filtered version of reality and, over time, hears only the echo of his own image.
But this is not only imposed from outside. It also connects with something inside the tyrant himself: an ego built on self-importance and a strong belief in his own exceptionality and superiority. Propaganda becomes a silent agreement between what he is told and what he already wants to believe.
Over time, propaganda no longer targets society alone. It returns to its source. The ruler, surrounded by a language of “necessity” and “exception,” begins to believe it. He stops being only a political actor and becomes a kind of existential necessity: not just a ruler, but a condition for the state to exist.
At this point, a dangerous form of authoritarian thinking appears: the nation is reduced to one person, institutions to one will, and history to one biography. Thus, criticizing the ruler becomes an attack on the nation itself, because the boundary between them has disappeared.
This is the deeper meaning of “I am the state.” It is not only a historical phrase linked to Louis XIV. It expresses the moment when power closes all access to truth and becomes a mirror reflecting only itself.
The Tyrant as a Prisoner of His Own Illusion
The paradox of tyranny is that the illusion used to control society ultimately traps its creator. What begins as domination ends in confinement. Gradually, the space of truth around the ruler contracts, while fear and flattery expand. He no longer encounters an external reality; he is surrounded instead by reflections carefully adjusted to confirm him. He hears only what reassures him and sees only his own image endlessly mirrored back to him—until even reality becomes indistinguishable from his self-image.
In this way, he becomes the first victim of the system he created.
As Hannah Arendt noted, totalitarian systems do not only shape society; they also reshape the very conditions in which truth is perceived. When critical voices disappear and public space closes, the ruler is left with nothing but the echo of his own voice. When fear dominates, truth recedes behind propaganda.
The tyrant no longer lives within a real society. He inhabits an artificial world produced by power, fear, and his own reflected image. This is why collapse is so violent: it is not a simple transition from strength to weakness, but a sudden shift from certainty to exposure.
The Seizure of Time
Tyranny tries to control time itself—not only the present, but also the past and the future. History is rewritten, collective memory is reshaped, and the ruler’s symbols become the starting point of national time, as if history began with him.
But time, unlike power, cannot be fully controlled. It can be distorted, but it does not, by any means, stop. When the ruler’s control weakens, reality slowly returns. People resume their lives with relief, as if a heavy burden has been removed. Institutions search for balance, daily life recovers its rhythm, and even language begins to free itself from fear.
At that moment, the tyrant discovers something simple: the time he thought he owned was only an illusion. The history he tried to control continued without him, indifferent to his absence. In the end, time does not recognize those who believe they can possess it.
Tyranny as a Relationship, Not a Person
Étienne de La Boétie, in Discours sur la Servitude Volontaire, reminds us that tyranny is never a purely personal power; it is sustained by a collective habit of obedience that transforms domination into an apparent necessity.
In this sense, tyranny is not something the ruler possesses. It is produced by a structure—institutions emptied of meaning, elites who protect themselves rather than speak the truth, and a society gradually conditioned to accept obedience as normal.
When this structure weakens, what once appeared absolute is revealed as fragile. This is why the fall of tyrants often looks strikingly similar across history. What collapses is not only the individual, but the entire system of illusions that made him appear necessary.
The Shock of Aftermath
At the moment of collapse, it is not only the system that breaks. The tyrant’s entire view of reality collapses.
He discovers that people never stopped living, that the country was not waiting for him, and that time was never suspended in his name.
Here lies García Márquez’s insight: the tragedy is not the loss of power, but the discovery that power was never necessary for the world to exist.
The patriarch does not suffer because he loses the throne. He suffers because he realizes the throne was never the centre of the world. History, which he believed reflected him, is only a river that continues to flow without noticing anyone.
The Recurrent Illusion
What tyranny reveals most clearly is not the strength of the ruler, but the fragility of the illusion behind his power: the belief that one person can represent an entire nation.
The tyrant who sees himself as the centre of history, and a society that comes to believe it cannot exist without him, are both imprisoned by the same illusion, though from opposite sides. One inflates himself until the nation is reduced to a single body. The other diminishes its own capacity to act until the nation is reduced to that body’s supposed necessity. Between these two distortions—narcissism at the top and resignation below—authoritarianism is born and endlessly reproduced.
Time eventually dissolves this shared illusion. When the dust settles, it becomes evident that the state was never a person, that history never paused for anyone, and that life continued the moment fear and illusion lost their grip.
The meaning of The Autumn of the Patriarch is this: the tragedy is not that tyrants fall, but that they realize too late that their fall was never a historic event—only a brief episode in a longer history that never required them.
But the harder lesson does not end with the fall of the tyrant; it begins after it. If the illusion survives, history does not repeat the same individual—it reproduces the same idea in another form.
Tyranny endures not because tyrants are identical, but because the illusion that sustains them is persistent.
For this reason, the liberation of the future does not begin with the removal of a regime or a leader, but with the breaking of the mental need for such authority. When societies cease to seek a figure or a system to embody the nation, they begin to recover themselves, and time regains its quiet sovereignty. Time, unlike power, does not require permission to move forward.
Messaoud Romdhani is a Tunisian Human Rights activist, former president of the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights, former vice president of the Tunisian Human Rights League.
Photo credit: Yup’ik mask from the Jacobsen collection, 1883, in the Ethnological Museum, Berlin, Germany. Photography was permitted in the museum without restriction.
