Once a pattern of political tyrany is established, the country is done for. The death will either fast or long and painful. Either civil war happens and everything is destroyed, or the institutes of a nation rot to the point the country is no more and a 3 storey mansion in it can be bough for half of Canadian median salary.

What has happened in Syria once first shots were fired:

Wise rich men dumped every piece of property and ran away fully aware of what will happen.

As the aforesaid happened, Syrian pound value began to close on 0. This already ment that in a country with debased economy, you can't buy a cheap laptop even if you sell a whole house let alone buying a plane ticket out of the country.

From that point, all ordinary people without huge sums of foreign currency are, basically speaking, doomed. And ownership of foreign currencies was already pretty much outlawed long before the conflict.

To prevent the state currency value hitting that of toilet paper, the tyrant prohibits immigration from the country so people would not dump Syrian pound. Import of goods is outlawed for regular people. The last scraps of pound value was spent to import guns.

At that point, the general population is screwed the second time. They know, the alternative to "ending it all in one go" does not exist anymore. Now, half of the population are drifting from city to city, backpacking.

The few mentally adequate aides of the tyrant leave the country as the last people with significant reserves of foreign currency. Now, the only guys fighting for the dictator are equally desperate people: thugs recruited from the lowest of the low, including criminals (shabihi). Now, a mayor of your town is yesterday's mafioso that was making money racketeering. No commercial activity has any meaning now. If whatever you have left have no value, you are screwed, but now you are screwed even more because you can't make any more money at all. You just get a bullet in the forehead, and the city mayor steals your goods and food like in a some dumb zombie apocalypse videogame.

All what is left after this point is either to fight, or to die. And most likely, you will be forced to fight. Either at gun point for the government, or for rebels as not fighting will be deemed as a show of loyalty to one side or another.

At this stage, even becoming an ISISian will look a good deal just to regain a glimpse of past ordinary life.

Would you like to end like that because you just don't want to loose your job, or be socially ostracized? Your past ordinary life already has a set expiration date whether you will decide to cling on it or not, it will be no more.

I saw quite a few formerly esteemed people from Syria, and even one former Syrian googler: a bank C-level, a family of a huge shopping mall owner, few people who ran IT outsourcing businesses. Whomever you see coming to the West on rights of human beings, and not refugees are guys like these. And even they have to backpack in hostels with their families. The banker even showed a sport bag full of Syrian pound stacks. He said that he hoped that if the pound will regain even 1/20th of it past value, he can at least buy a new set of clothes for his family.