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.
The parallels to our present moment are not subtle, especially when considering the modern billionaire class. Many of these individuals have built extraordinary companies and created genuine value. That is not in dispute. But somewhere along the way, a troubling development occurred. Success in one domain—whether it be technology, finance, or media—bred a self-belief that those founders could — and should — dictate policy on public health, education, geopolitics, space exploration, and the structure of democratic governance itself.
Oligarchy Has a Track Record — and It Isn’t Good
At the same time, consolidation of the media landscape has given a handful of people tremendous leverage over the information we consume, the platforms on which we communicate, and increasingly, the political candidates who govern us. When a single company controls the digital public square, or when a single individual can move markets with a social media post, or when billionaires fund political campaigns with the explicit expectation of policy concessions in return, we have left the realm of entrepreneurial capitalism and entered something closer to oligarchy. And oligarchy, as Aristotle observed twenty-four hundred years ago, is one of the most unstable and corrosive forms of government—precisely because it replaces process with patronage and merit with proximity to power.
The same arrogance has infected the political sphere. The expansion of unilateral executive action—governance by decree rather than deliberation—has accelerated in ways that should concern every citizen regardless of party. Presidents now launch military operations without congressional authorization, restructure entire agencies by command, and treat the legislative branch as an afterthought rather than a co-equal partner in governance. Although the trend has been building across administrations, the current moment represents something qualitatively different: an open and unapologetic assertion that the executive need not engage the deliberate (and sometimes frustrating) machinery of democratic process.
The framers of the Constitution designed a system of checks and balances precisely because they knew that concentrated power, however well-intentioned at the outset, inevitably descends into something destructive. The separation of powers was not a bug in the system; it is an intentional feature. And when we abandon it in the name of speed or decisiveness or strong leadership, we are not modernizing; we are regressing to the very form of governance the Enlightenment sought to overcome.
What History Actually Teaches Us
If five thousand years of recorded human history teach us anything, it is this: societies that submit to process thrive, and societies that abandon process collapse. This is not a sentimental claim, but instead an empirical one. The great periods of peace and prosperity in human civilization have almost always coincided with the presence of functioning institutions, respected legal frameworks, and leaders who understood that their authority derived from something larger than themselves. The post-World War II international order, for all its imperfections, produced the longest stretch of great-power peace in modern history, anchored by institutions like the United Nations, the Bretton Woods system, and multilateral trade agreements. Conversely, every era of catastrophic government failure—the late Roman Republic, the Thirty Years’ War, the collapse of Weimar Germany—witnessed a period in which elites decided that process was a mere suggestion and that their own judgment was sufficient cause to ignore it. The pattern is so consistent across the centuries that ignoring this requires a willful act of historical illiteracy.
What Happens When the Social Contract Breaks
There is another dimension to this that deserves emphasis~~—the social contract in its most fundamental form~~. When institutions function and processes are respected, they send a signal to every citizen that the system is fair enough to warrant their participation. This is especially important to those who are not wealthy, not connected, not born into privilege. A working-class family in Ohio or a young entrepreneur in Austin does not need the system to be perfect; they need it to be legitimate. They need to believe that the rules apply equally, that hard work and talent can be rewarded.
When processes break down—whether because billionaires operate above the law, presidents govern by fiat, or monopolies crush competition—that belief evaporates. And when it evaporates, so does social cohesion. The aspiration that holds our democratic society together is not a naive faith that everything will work out; it is a reasonable expectation that the playing field, while never perfectly level, is at least governed by rules that everyone must follow. Destroy that expectation and the results aren’t efficiencies; they’re resentment, polarization, and the very instability that the powerful believed their unilateral action would prevent.
The Chorus Is Watching
The Greek tragedians knew how the story ends when hubris goes unchecked. The billionaire who believes his fortune makes him a philosopher-king, the president who believes his office makes him a sovereign — Sophocles wrote those roles 25 centuries ago. He knew how they end.
But they aren’t a foregone conclusion. The way out is through the disciplined commitment to process. It is Cicero’s insight that true freedom requires constraint. It is the hard-won wisdom of five millennia that tells us societies prosper when power is checked, when institutions are respected, and when leaders have the humility to recognize that they are public servants.
We can still choose that path. But the chorus is watching, and the hour is late. We don’t have that much time left.
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