[josephg]

Life isn’t like children’s cartoons, where there’s “goodies” and “baddies” and we need to figure out who is who, then lock all the baddies up in jail forever. To quote Solzhenitsyn, “The line separating good and evil passes through every human heart”.

Your philosophy is shared by all the people who committed the most evil acts of the last century. All of them have tried to stamp out the “evil people” in their societies. They only disagree about who the evil people are.

[jongjong]

I disagree. There is a spectrum and some people are much more evil (in the sense; more harmful to society) than others and the concentration of evil is higher near the centers of power.

I suspect that many of the attempts at social cleansing are natural (though not necessarily just) reactions to other less visible evils carried out over longer periods of time by those in power. Clearly the Bolsheviks in Russia were not happy people... There was a process that had been occurring for centuries prior which made them unhappy enough to carry out a revolution. It is known that Russia's feudal system had been particularly harsh on peasants for centuries.

The French royals were so detached from the misery which they caused that it seems somewhat unsurprising that they couldn't even keep their heads physically attached to their bodies in the end. Their metaphorical heads were already quite detached from reality before the guillotine made the separation literal.

[vianneychevalie]

I think you’re mistaken, at least about the French revolution. It was carried out by rich people, looking for more power, making use of a common and regular occurence of popular uprising (Jacqueries, in political science, is the name of those quite common « revolutions »).

Royalty does not necessarily cause misery, Sweden, Spain, the UK are all monarchies. Colbert and Louis XIV built a lot of foundations that you know France for today; even later non-democratic regimes such as the Second Empire (Napoleon III and Haussman) structured the Paris that brings tourists the world over…

The French revolution - that I know of - led to the invention of restaurants because rich people from remote cities came to Paris and wanted to live the fastuous life they envied from nobles. Social cleansing? Nothing of the sort, social exploitation as always, from where money and power came as always.

[gumby]

> I think you’re mistaken, at least about the French revolution. It was carried out by rich people, looking for more power, making use of a common and regular occurence of popular uprising

It is always thus; one must belong in order to revolt. In fact that was successfully exploited by the Swedish King in the mid 16th century by wiping out a significant chunk of disaffected aristocrats to form a moat between the monarchy and the classes that couldn't afford to revolt. A similar strategy was taken by Louis XIV by forcing the aristos to move to Versailles away from their intrinsic power bases. Of course in bot cases this just delayed things and the middle classes formed alliances with aristos and overthrow those regimes too.

You see this also in both competing sides of the Chinese civil war, Viet Nam's and India's independence movements, the Bolsheviks, US revolution and its civil war, etc. The hagiographic retellings always emphasize of the popular underpinnings in order to try to establish or maintain legitimacy, but it is never the case.

[toyg]

Spain effectively lost its monarchy status by popular will, and it took a violent and very bloody coup to reinstate it - but even then, as a ceremonial puppet. Similarly the UK. I am not familiar with Sweden but from what I occasionally read, the Swedish crown lost pretty much all its power too. Monarchy as an institution is fundamentally bad in the long run, because belonging to a certain family is no guarantee of competence in government - something that the Romans had already discovered.

[josephg]

> some people are much more evil (in the sense; more harmful to society) than others and the concentration of evil is higher near the centers of power.

I’d similarly argue that some people are much more good (in the sense that their work actively makes society better). Their concentration is also higher near the centers of power. An awful lot of people go into government out of a genuine love of their country.

[southerntofu]

I understand your point, but strong disagree from experience.

What do you think happens to people who want to do good by approaching positions of power? In my experience, friends who became teachers or cops, they either became evil/abusive themselves, or they were pushed into depression by social exclusion and either left or killed themselves. These are some of the jobs with the highest suicide levels, precisely because some people came to do good while realizing the systems in place made it entirely impossible.

[DanBC]

> These are some of the jobs with the highest suicide levels

What data are you using please?

[southerntofu]

Thanks for asking, made me check. It seems teachers suicide data is not as drastic as hearsay has it, although from anecdata i believe depression is very widespread:

https://blog.francetvinfo.fr/l-instit-humeurs/2019/11/09/cha...

As for the cops, there are a few statistical/sociological studies. I may have exaggerated claiming they are the jobs with the highest suicide levels, but they do have higher suicide level than the general population.

https://www.liberation.fr/checknews/les-policiers-se-suicide...

Anecdotally, what the article doesn't mention is that, at least here in France, it's not uncommon for cops committing suicide to actually kill their wife and children before killing themselves... which i believe is a rather unique feat of their profession, but as there are no official stats on the topic you should take this claim with a grain of salt.

[jongjong]

Sure but in my experience, these people rarely get promoted to positions of power. A lot of the well-meaning people end up as low-level political puppets because they don't see the evil that's happening right before their eyes; the reason is because good people fail to comprehend the motivations behind evil and that makes them blind to it.

There is a lot of denial like "No, that's not possible, such and such would never do such an evil thing, what would they gain out of it?" The fact that you're a good person may be the reason why you do not see the motive or do not understand its significance. Some people really want total control, they want it really really badly. They could be a billionaire, a president and yet their first for more power is stronger than a person lost in the desert thirsts for water.