A Frightening Scenario That Will Never Happen

What if marauding warlords took over the world, divided it into separate dominions, imposed exploitative levies on every productive inhabitant of the land they controlled, built a vast infrastructure of roads to acquire easy access to their serfs, created an immense apparatus of propaganda designed to brainwash the serfs into believing that only under the rule of the warlords can they be free men and women, destroyed their dignity, self-reliance, and natural communal bonds by a system of periodic handouts, and finally blurred the distinction between themselves and the serfs by inviting the latter to join the ranks of the former, thus initiating a great, neverending spectacle of everyone trying to live at the expense of everyone else in a vicious cycle of mutual theft and collective hatred? What a terrible thought! Thank God we have democratic governments and welfare states to save us from such scenarios.