The Inner Monologue

What fascinates me most isn’t a single historical event, but the recurring moment in every civilization when power begins to consolidate, and the people—often unknowingly—trade liberty for the illusion of stability. I’m drawn to those inflection points: the fall of the Roman Republic, the rise of European monarchies, the slow drift of democratic nations toward authoritarianism. They’re like echoes through time, each teaching the same lesson in a different dialect.

It’s not just the politics that interest me, but the psychology—the way ordinary citizens rationalize extraordinary shifts. How the crowd cheers as walls go up, how fear makes obedience feel patriotic, how civility erodes one small rule at a time until the entire social contract is rewritten. Watching it happen again, in my own lifetime, gives history a pulse. It reminds me that tyranny doesn’t arrive with fanfare; it seeps in with applause.

So if I had to name the event that fascinates me most, it would be the ongoing one—the slow-motion transformation of democracy into something unrecognizable, the moment future historians will point to and say, That’s where they lost the thread. And maybe, just maybe, I’m fascinated because I still hope we haven’t.