THE GREATEST THREAT to human happiness is tyranny. Other dangers, such as Climate Change or Covid-19, may well be fearful, but tyranny does not merely end in the sometimes considerable extinction of life (consider the 45 million deaths caused by Mao’s “Great Leap Forward”). More than that, tyranny oppresses the human soul. No one in a tyranny is free, not even the tyrant: it is a society in which everyone is afraid, in which actions are guided by fear before truth or reason, and from which there is no escape. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has revealed the failure of the West to understand and contain tyrannical dictatorships.

Tyranny is a type of constitution where one individual controls a