Guillotines were also public during the French Revolution, so you have to keep up the crowd’s appetite for guillotining people. The more innocents you send to the guillotine, the more they lose their taste for it.
A bloodthirsty mob is like a fire. It requires fuel or it can burn itself out but it also needs to be tended or it might blaze out of your control. And when you start messing with big enough ones, you run real risks of it killing you.
Tyrants ain’t like that. They can often abstract away most of their killing so they just gave orders while their subordinates are just following orders. And the thing is, a mob’s anger gets sated if it lets itself, but a tyrant’s only killing a little out of anger. Mostly its fear and greed. And once you become a tyrant those are two bottomless pits. Fear in particular because everyone you kill out of fear spawns a new people who want you dead.
Guillotines were also public during the French Revolution, so you have to keep up the crowd’s appetite for guillotining people. The more innocents you send to the guillotine, the more they lose their taste for it.
It’s not exactly funny-haha, but it’s strange to think about the approval of a literal bloodthirsty mob as the limiting factor on violence.
A bloodthirsty mob is like a fire. It requires fuel or it can burn itself out but it also needs to be tended or it might blaze out of your control. And when you start messing with big enough ones, you run real risks of it killing you.
Tyrants ain’t like that. They can often abstract away most of their killing so they just gave orders while their subordinates are just following orders. And the thing is, a mob’s anger gets sated if it lets itself, but a tyrant’s only killing a little out of anger. Mostly its fear and greed. And once you become a tyrant those are two bottomless pits. Fear in particular because everyone you kill out of fear spawns a new people who want you dead.
This is democracy manifest!