fellow_human@lemmy.zip
Context: the classic “power corrupts” cycle. Revolutionaries promise freedom and justice, but the second they get a taste of absolute power, they suddenly decide it’s too good to give up. Castro, Lenin, Cromwell, Robespierre… they all started as “men of the people” and ended up as the very tyrants they swore to overthrow. The meme just takes that historical pattern and makes it hilariously blunt.
They had to kill a buttload of actual ideological revolutionaries to seize that absolute power though.
I think it is more a case of psychopaths being better at rising to the top than it has anything to do with revolutionary ideology.
somebody_to_love@lemmy.today 9 hours ago
I think this idea is exactly the metaphor that Tolkien was going after when he designed the One Ring. Gandalf and Galadriel actually say it loud: “I would try to do good but the Ring would corrupt me and I would become a tyrant”. Makes sense after he lived through two world wars and the Russian revolution.