The Greeks had a word for what happens when power goes unchecked: hubris. The pattern in their tragedies is always the same — a leader, swollen with success, decides the rules no longer apply to him. These men were not intrinsically evil; their gifts fueled their overreach while the chorus watched the collapse. Looking at America’s billionaire class and its executive branch today, the warnings from antiquity have never felt more urgent.
When Success Becomes a License to Rule
We are living through an era in which a small number of individuals have accumulated influence that rivals or exceeds that of sovereign governments. Think billionaires who control vast technology platforms, media empires, and financial networks. At the same time, presidential authority has expanded to a degree that would have alarmed the framers of the American Constitution. With increasing overlap between both, the result is a special kind of arrogance: the conviction that personal wealth or political office confers not just power but infallible wisdom. This is hubris in the age of algorithms and executive orders.
Cicero’s Warning: Process Is Not the Enemy
Cicero, writing in the final tumultuous decades of the Roman Republic, wrote that “We are slaves to the law in order to be free.” It’s profound in its simplicity. Freedom does not come from the absence of constraint; it comes from our willingness to suborn a certain degree of individual will to a broader, shared process. Structures like the law, the constitution, and regulatory frameworks are not obstacles to greatness — and they are not the domain of a shadowy “deep state.” They are the architecture within which greatness can thrive, free from tyranny. Cicero understood this because he watched, in real time, as Rome’s elites began to treat the Republic’s institutions as inconveniences rather than sacred obligations. Julius Caesar did not destroy the Roman Republic with a single act of violence; he destroyed it by systematically treating its processes as mere suggestions.
