A series of four images with black text on a white background, containing a long reflective passage about how authoritarianism and oppression gradually take hold unnoticed. First image: The text explains how small, seemingly inconsequential steps—each justified or regretted—prevent people from recognizing the larger process until it’s too late, comparing it to a farmer not noticing corn growing until it towers overhead.
Second image: A colleague explains how each act is only slightly worse than the last, leading people to wait for a shocking turning point that never comes. Fear, uncertainty, and the desire not to stand alone stop people from resisting. Outsiders seem content, and those who sense danger are dismissed as alarmists.
Third image: The text describes how, eventually, a small personal incident shatters self-deception, revealing that everything has changed—society, spirit, and morality. People accept things once unthinkable. Life feels normal on the surface, but principles have eroded. When realization comes, it’s too late—people are compromised by inaction.
Fourth image: The writer notes how friends drift away, meetings shrink, and isolation grows, weakening resistance further. The long-awaited great occasion for mass opposition never arrives. Instead, oppression progresses step by step, each act numbing people to the next. The example is given of Nazi Germany, where atrocities escalated gradually, making it harder to resist at each stage.
From Milton Mayer's "They Thought They Were Free"
I first read it in November and I'm rereading it now. It crushing feeling the exact same things as this academic did. It's the same process.
