Does the fall of autocracy automatically restore democracy?

The colossal bronze statue has been pulled down by cranes. Towering pillars are now plastered with rebellious graffiti. Disreputable police headquarters lie in ruins, gutted by the fire of public rage.

These moments immediately following the fall of a despot are often described by international media, observers, and urban society with a kind of romantic optimism as the “early days” or “Day One”, as if the transition from a dark tunnel to the sunny boulevard of liberal democracy were a straightforward and inevitable journey.

Yet from the beer halls of Weimar Germany to the battered thoroughfares of post-Saddam Baghdad, history has repeatedly warned us that the vast vacuum of political authority left in the wake of a dictator’s fall is rarely filled by reasoned parliamentary debate or a revised constitution.

Borrowing from the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, this interim period can be described as an 'interregnum', an in-between. As he wrote, the old is dying, but the new cannot yet be born. It is in this shadowy span of time that a host of morbid symptoms emerge.

Prolonged authoritarian rule leaves deep and lasting scars on the public psyche, particularly on the psychology of young people. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt shows that the core strength of totalitarian rule lies not merely in police repression or the reign of fear, but rather in its profound strategy of “atomizing” society—breaking it into isolated individuals.

Rulers deliberately destroy mutual trust, social bonds, and the capacity for collective organization, turning each person into a detached and lonely being. As a result, individuals afflicted by extreme isolation and a sense of meaninglessness surrender themselves blindly to the ideology of the leader or the state as their sole means of survival, and, lacking mutual trust, fail to build any form of collective resistance.

This becomes even clearer through the metaphor of the ordinary greengrocer in Czech thinker and statesman Václav Havel’s classic essay 'The Power of the Powerless'. Every day, the shopkeeper hangs a slogan in his store, “Workers of the world, unite.” Yet he does not believe in this slogan for a moment, and he knows that passers-by do not believe in it either.

Still, he displays it simply to avoid trouble, to keep himself safe. According to Havel, modern authoritarianism does not merely demand obedience from citizens; it demands that they live “within a lie.”

In this context of a culture of falsehood, we may also recall the concept of “Ketman” developed by the Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet Czesław Miłosz. Miłosz borrowed the term from the travel writings of the nineteenth-century French diplomat Gobineau and employed it in his classic work The Captive Mind.

It was said that in ancient Iran, religious dissenters concealed their true beliefs in public in order to survive or to protect themselves from enemies, outwardly conforming to the surrounding society. Miłosz transposed this strategy of religious self-preservation into the modern political context, showing that under authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, some people practice “Ketman.” That is, they openly display blind loyalty to the ruler’s ideology and enthusiastically sing the ruler’s praises, while deep within they harbour entirely different beliefs and continue to despise the regime.

This is not mere cowardice; rather, it is a refined form of intellectual performance, a kind of double life. The practitioner of Ketman derives a secret sense of pride or superiority from the belief that, through outward falsehood, he is deceiving the machinery of the state while keeping his inner “free self” untouched.

But Miłosz issues a brutally sharp warning: over time, as one continues this game of deception and performance against one’s own conscience, the true face and the mask gradually merge, and the individual loses his authenticity and moral integrity, ultimately becoming a slave to the very system of lies he once believed he was outwitting.

To understand how authoritarianism corrodes mutual trust and confidence among citizens, we can turn to political scientist Lisa Wedeen’s 'Ambiguities of Domination', which dissects the regime of Hafez al-Assad in Syria. Through the concept of “as if politics,” Wedeen presents a chilling picture that stands as documentary evidence of psychological domination in modern authoritarianism.

Wedeen shows that under this system, citizens display blind devotion to the ruler’s supposed miraculous powers and greatness in public gatherings and in everyday life, behaving as if they genuinely believe in it. Yet behind this spectacle, both ruler and ruled know perfectly well that this devotion is nothing more than a farcical charade and an exercise in falsehood.

According to Wedeen, shrewd authoritarian rulers do not actually expect love or genuine belief from the populace. Instead, by forcing people to perform these bizarre and false rituals, they seek to crush their moral backbone and their courage to speak the truth. As a result, living day after day in compulsory performance and a double life against one’s own conscience, an entire generation becomes psychologically “schizophrenic,” fragmented and divided selves.

The long-term consequences of this process are profoundly terrifying. It erodes the most fundamental human quality, trust, to such an extent that people later find themselves unable to place deep faith in any political ideology at all. They begin to see politics and state institutions merely as staged performances or elaborate deceptions.

Thus, in the power vacuum and social chaos that follow the fall of authoritarian rule, clandestine pathways for extreme ideologies such as fascism can open anew. If authoritarianism is a sedative, a sleeping pill, then fascism is an explosive “stimulant,” akin to gunpowder.

Authoritarian comfort lies in popular passivity: it wants people to forget politics and lock themselves inside their homes. Fascism, however, has a different appetite. It does not seek passivity but collective frenzy. A fascist system wants masses of people to flood the streets with torches in hand and to sacrifice themselves to a bloody mission of “purifying” the nation.

The tragic irony of this cycle is that the crowd believes it is making a revolution, while in reality it is rapidly descending into darkness and even greater instability. By hollowing out civil society and stunting the moral development of the young, the authoritarian ruler unknowingly serves as the “midwife” to the fascist monster.

The most profound psychological explanation of why people, in the aftermath of authoritarianism, yearn once again for subjugation was offered by Erich Fromm, the Frankfurt School psychologist. In his classic work 'Escape from Freedom,' Fromm argues that modern individuals desire freedom, yet are unable to bear the loneliness, uncertainty, and burden of responsibility that freedom entails.

Most people lack personalities strong enough to withstand this psychological strain. As a result, they choose the “certainty of bondage” and the warmth of security over uncertain freedom. They come to believe that surrendering their selfhood at the feet of a leader is the only way to escape this cosmic loneliness.

Prolonged rule by fear and a culture of performance erase individuality from within and give rise to a peculiar slave mentality. The Russian sociologist Aleksandr Zinoviev gave this pathological human type a name, 'Homo Sovieticus'.

Such people may loathe the state with all their hearts, yet for the sake of livelihood or security they cling to that very state like parasites. They fear personal initiative and shirk responsibility for their own lives. Consequently, when authoritarian rule collapses, this suddenly acquired freedom becomes an unbearable burden for an “orphaned” society.
Post-Saddam Iraq and the history of the Arab Spring remind us of this brutal truth: freedom does not arrive simply by removing the “iron man” or dictator from his throne. Societies crippled by long subjugation often fail to celebrate freedom and instead plunge into a profound existential crisis and the abyss of chaos.

The French sociologist Gustave Le Bon, in 'The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind,' showed how an individual’s conscience dissolves within a crowd. The most dangerous aspect of collective frenzy is the disappearance of personal responsibility: a harmless individual who would be incapable of even imagining a crime when alone can, under the excitement of the crowd, set fire to a library. This happens because, under the cover of anonymity, he convinces himself that it is not his personal crime, but rather a reflection of the so-called “will of the people.”

Le Bon himself was a conservative and hostile to democracy, and history bears witness to the fact that it was by exploiting this very “fear of the masses” that dictators such as Hitler and Mussolini designed their propaganda. From Le Bon they learned that crowds are not subdued through reason, but through emotion and hypnosis.

Yet viewing the masses merely as a manipulable entity, as Le Bon did, offers no solution to crises in times of transition. Fascism wants people to remain a mob, an unthinking, frenzied mass. Democracy, by contrast, wants the masses to become citizens.

The collapse of an old authoritarian system, therefore, may not mark the final chapter of the long novel of democratic struggle; it may instead signal the beginning of a dangerous one. The fall of authoritarianism does not automatically bring freedom, it merely creates an opportunity for citizens to attain it.

* Mohammad Sajjadur Rahman is part-time lecturer, IUB
* The views expressed are the author’s own.