Power Needs Compliance
Arthur Schopenhauer, who died in 1860, was an atheist German pessimist philosopher who rejected free will, considering it irrational and insatiable. He influenced thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Richard Wagner. Schopenhauer believed ignorance has a function; it exists for a reason. Thinking, he argued, is hard—it is tiresome. It consumes energy. When you think, you expend effort. Mimicking and obeying without critical reflection is easier—you conserve energy.
Schopenhauer explains that every power structure requires obedience in order to exist, and stupidity becomes the foundation of that obedience. Intelligent people question authority. They observe inconsistencies, irrational regulations, and rules that do not make sense—and they begin to discard discipline. Stupid people do not question; they accept what they are told and follow orders without examining whether those orders are justified. Thus, they become ideal subjects for any system that requires compliance.
Sometimes I feel the traditional Eritrean saying echoes Schopenhauer’s views, “Glul m’garu Huw glul yebu gaaru”—’the stupid is fine; those close to him suffer!’
Another philosopher, Hannah Arendt, described a related phenomenon as “the banality of evil,” the title of one of her books. Arendt expected to meet monsters when she examined bureaucratic evil. Instead, she found ordinary individuals who had simply stopped thinking and surrendered their moral agency. They were not demonic. They were functionaries.
Commanders and Leaders Lead Change
Soldiers often fall into this category. Commanders, the echelon of the army, and the broader system prefer obedience, which is called discipline! Freedom becomes secondary—sometimes irrelevant. In much of the Third World, officers—especially colonels—operate as the main political engines, a link between the top leaders and the common soldiers.
Most crises of misrule and social evil originate with overly ambitious politicians; the top brass frequently fail to untangle those crises. When they attempt to intervene, they treat change as if suppressing a small barrack mutiny. The public becomes incidental. Citizens are reduced to objects to be managed, not participants in change and governance.
Burtukan Mideksa and Malala Yousafzai
I do not want to dwell excessively on Birtukan Mideksa, the activist who was jailed when the EPRDF ruled Ethiopia, but let me recount an episode.
In 2010, I attended a human rights forum in Oslo, Norway. Birtukan was one of the two featured figures; the other was Malala Yousafzai. She was “the youngest Nobel Prize laureate in history, receiving the Peace Prize in 2014 at age 17, and is the second Pakistani and the only Pushtun to receive a Nobel Prize.”
Ethiopian, Sudanese, and other activists attended the forum. But the main hall session felt theatrical—an orchestrated morale exercise. It began with an African-themed procession: men and women dressed in traditional West African attire carrying bongo drums—doom, doom, doom—entering from the back of the hall and advancing solemnly toward the stage. It resembled a funeral procession. Maybe we were the deceased, though not in coffins. That was the opening ceremony. I found the spectacle contrived and hollow.
The afternoon workshops were different. They were educational, serious, and practical. I attended a session led by IT specialists who trained activists on bypassing government internet blockages, maintaining digital security, and avoiding detection. At the time, such techniques felt advanced; today they are commonplace. That contrast itself says something about how quickly technology normalizes resistance tools.
Then came what I would call the banality of activism.
An Ethiopian speaker described Birtukan’s imprisonment in emotional detail—rats crawling beneath her while she slept on the floor. The narrative was vivid, designed to provoke outrage and sympathy. The outrage was achieved; most people exclaimed, “Ohhhh!” Even those who spent their lives sharing floors with rodents.
How terrible!
In some parts of the world, rats seem like guests of honor in homes and workplaces, let alone in jail.
Birtukan was eventually freed, left for the USA, and returned to Ethiopia after Abiy Ahmed was elected prime minister of Ethiopia. He appointed Birtukan commissioner of the electoral commission.
In 2019, her commission issued a proclamation barring the Tigray region from conducting elections, which led to a standoff with Abiy Ahmed. The confrontation escalated into the destructive war that devastated Northern Ethiopia, particularly Tigray—a conflict whose structural tensions remain unresolved.
Ethiopia made a 360-degree turn, and today it’s dealing with another election crisis involving the federal government and the Tigray region. But it is worse: the political landscape is facing many of the unresolved disputes that existed before the 2021 election. The post-war alliances that were reconfigured now appear fragile. At the center is the dispute between the Tigray and Amhara regions—they both claim territories in the Western Tigray region.
They rarely admit it, but figures such as Getachew Reda and Tsadkan Gebretensae project confidence though the situation remains volatile. The possibility of renewed violence is not abstract.
Tsadkan’s trajectory illustrates the dilemma: when one has previously resorted to pouring fuel on a fire, it becomes the familiar instrument. The same pattern appears in Abiy’s political posture. He presents himself as anti-war, yet the structural incentives surrounding him tell a more complicated story. He governs cautiously, aware of international scrutiny following his hasty Nobel recognition. In the previous war, his position was secured at enormous human cost. His political survival was intertwined with bloodshed and displacement. The structural logic that made that possible has not disappeared.
Perhaps Ethiopians should consider appointing him director of the Addis Ababa Exhibition Complex—and expanding it to every city. He excels at showmanship: tourist corridors, parks, and visual transformation. Who concerns himself with the ordinary Ethiopian? Flashy development, flamboyant landscaping, and decorative urban projects—these appeal to a rising nouveau riche class. Meanwhile, the poor become an inconvenience to be relocated away from the capital. Foreign tourists may then sail peacefully through gorge waterways redesigned to resemble Venice.
As beautiful as such projects may appear, beauty constructed atop unresolved injustice does not endure. Thousands were displaced when their “eyesore” homes were razed to make way for the decorative parks and palaces. But no city can remain serene while citizens suffer manmade calamities—especially wars manufactured by their own political class.
Nothing remains beautiful while citizens endure displacement, violence, and the consequences of elite ambition.
Awate Forum