After the Jedi

What happens when evil wins, and keeps winning?

I've been turning over a few questions. What happens when evil triumphs in the long term? What happens after there are no more Jedi, or Jews, or gays, or any other enemy of the state, invented or not? Does evil turn on itself? Do boredom and corruption rule endlessly? Is bureaucracy the last one standing? And when there is no one left to oppress because everyone is the oppressor, what kind of life is that? What is appealing about it?

Here is where I ended up.

Evil can win, but it can't stop

Its engine is the struggle, not the victory. Hannah Arendt observed that totalitarian movements don't really hunt real enemies. They hunt "objective enemies," categories defined by the regime's needs, which means the category can be redrawn whenever the supply runs low. René Girard described the same mechanism as scapegoating: a community discharges its tension onto a victim, feels unity, and then the tension rebuilds and demands another. So after the Jedi come their sympathizers, then the lukewarm, then the officials who weren't zealous enough. Stalin's terror moved from Old Bolsheviks to the army to the secret police who had carried out the earlier purges. The Khmer Rouge executed thousands of its own cadres, many of them interrogators. Vader choking his admirals is the same logic in a cape. The terror turns inward because it has to go somewhere.

Then the terror gets tired

Purges are expensive and dangerous to the purger. The survivors learn the obvious lesson and strike an unspoken bargain to stop killing each other. After Stalin, the Soviet elite did exactly that, and what followed was the stagnation of the Brezhnev years, not apocalypse. Fear gives way to routine, and ideology becomes liturgy: recited by everyone, believed by no one. Václav Havel's greengrocer puts the slogan in his window not out of faith but as a signal that he is in order, and he knows his neighbor knows it. The shared performance of a known lie holds the whole thing together.

So yes, bureaucracy is probably the last one standing

Arendt called it rule by Nobody, and thought it might be the cruelest form of tyranny, since there is no one to appeal to, argue with, or blame. When the founding passion burns out, the apparatus remains: forms, quotas, files, careers. It runs because mortgages and promotions depend on it. The Stasi built an enormous machine for producing paper about people who were doing nothing. Even the Death Star was a bureaucratic artifact, with a budget, a review board, and an unguarded exhaust port.

And when everyone is the oppressor?

Late totalitarian societies come close to this. Denunciation becomes ordinary currency: you informed on a neighbor to get an apartment, and someone informed on you. Oppression stops being something one class does to another and becomes a diffuse medium, like weather. What dies first is trust, and with it cooperation beyond the family, honest speech, and eventually competence, because no one dares report bad news upward. Corruption becomes the lubricant that lets a broken system function. People still fall in love and tell jokes (the jokes are some of the best evidence of what they really thought), but private life becomes a bunker and public life a stage set.

Why would anyone want this?

I think we have to take the appeal seriously, or we will mistake it for stupidity:

• Belonging - Eric Hoffer's true believer escapes an unwanted self into the mass movement, which asks only for loyalty, not for him to be interesting or good.

• Release from freedom - Erich Fromm argued that autonomy frightens people, and authority offers relief from choice, doubt, and responsibility.

• Resentment with a license - Cruelty feels like justice once it is sanctioned.

• Simplicity - The moral map is clear, and you are on the right side of it.

• Participation - Even a clerk feels part of a historical project.

• Order - For people who have lived through chaos, whoever ends it is a relief.

None of this requires believers to be monsters, which is the uncomfortable part. Most are ordinary people answering real needs with a terrible solution.

Evil is also a parasite

It borrows trust, competence, institutions, and meaning from the world it is consuming. When the host is gone, the parasite starves or fossilizes. Long-term outcomes cluster in three types: collapse (the USSR), ossification (North Korea, a dynasty running on a frozen founding myth), or mutation (China, where the ideology hollowed out and the enemy shifted to whatever is currently useful).

Total victory almost never happens, though. There is always a remnant, a samizdat, a Luke on a farm. A tyranny that truly finished its enemies would be a society with no memory of what it had ruled over, and perhaps that is the final horror: not boredom or infighting, but forgetting what was lost.

Do humans just suck?

On some days it feels that way. But every one of these systems depended on ordinary people's cooperation, which means each was also vulnerable to their refusal. When enough greengrocers took the sign out of the window in 1989, regimes that looked permanent fell within weeks. In every one of these societies, under conditions designed to prevent it, some people hid a neighbor, copied a banned book by hand, or told the joke anyway.

My working conclusion is that humans don't suck so much as they respond powerfully to their surroundings. Reward cruelty and punish decency, and most people drift toward cruelty. Reverse the incentives, and most drift toward decency. That is less flattering than "people are good" and less bleak than "people are bad," but it carries a practical lesson: the design of institutions matters enormously, and so does the small number of people who hold the line when the incentives say not to.

Which leaves the question I can't stop thinking about, and perhaps a novel: what do the children of the winners want, when victory is a given and the founding hatred is inherited rather than felt?