Authority without accountability produces entirely predictable results. Only the most extraordinary person can continue to act rightly when equipped with power and freed of all constraints on its exercise. Far more typical is rapid moral degeneration, culminating in depravity.
Yet a life even less worth living than the mere survival of a beast of the field is exactly what one must fear under the rule of a depraved despot. Which, of course, is exactly why a well-constituted government must, above all, prevent the usurpation and abuse of power.
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It is also why the governed themselves should fear and revile above all a leader who shows any inclination to usurp and abuse power. Yet Aesop's fable of the frogs who wanted a king clearly shows that bored and comfortable persons cannot imagine horrors they've never known.
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Thus it is that boredom, complacency, and lack of imagination may ultimately doom a polity to a fate worse than death. Eternal vigilance may indeed be the price of liberty, but people stop paying their insurance when the evils from which it protects them seem unimaginably remote.
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