You know, I feel like the history of the 20th century needs some reframing. We often portray it as being about a clash of political ideologies, but tbh it’s really a clash of and between a number of political personality cults.

I wonder if maybe the clash of ideologies was not the salient point. Like, every Marxist-Leninist country has the same problem: a charismatic leader would arise, a cult would firm, the post-revolutionary government would go nuts, lots of people would die, gaslighting

And a similar thing happened to the fascist governments. Charismatic leader, cult, post-revolutionary government murders a bunch of people, gaslighting, get embroiled in unwinnable conflict, collapse.

And now we are seeing something similar happen in western democracies, though it hasn’t entirely played out yet. Bellicose leader, cult, leader gets elected, government goes nuts, unexpected crisis spirals out of control, a lot of people die... and then whatever comes next

What’s happening right now isn’t as extreme as the Great Leap Forward or as intentional as the Holocaust, and maybe it never gets to that point, but it’s following this same kind of pattern of personality cult and mass death.

And I will note that for a lot of these societies, as soon as the person around which the cult centered died, the deaths pretty much stopped, even if the underlying system remained intact after the transition.