The ideal and the real application. The illustrious thinkers transformed into fascinating ideologues whose approaches ended up feeding totalitarianisms and dictatorships. How could it be? How did different countries feed on great ideas to transform them into political deformities?
Mark Lilla introduces the concept: philotirania. A kind of magnetism that ends up attracting ideals and their thinking minds towards that real adaptation that, overcoming all contradiction, ends up justifying the end for all types of means until it is reached.
The key, as the author points out, is HONESTY. Reason and intellect is easily adjustable to what the ideologue wants to see, beyond objectivity. The mold of a constructive ideal can end up being substantially altered, cracking and corrupting absolutely, but if the ideologist wants to continue to convince himself that there can be no possible failure in his political construction, if he feels transcendent when being captured by a political party that is amassing power , the ideologue may end up succumbing to the deformity of his work, a kind of mirror of parallel reality.
It is a kind of fascination with power, of stubbornness from that perspective of the preponderance of one's own ideal.
Examples are in every historical period, from the fierce Nazism with Rosenberg, to the Marxism and Lenninism of the most atrocious communism. It is curious how supposedly scattered ideas end up concentrating the worst of the human being, which is nothing other than thought considered as doctrine. Wisdom grants that, wisdom, but misunderstood, it ends up being understood as a virtue above any other option, an absolute truth from which it is easy to extract its derivative towards authoritarian power.
But every hindsight has a learning point. Political news is peppered with reckless thinkers. The democratic foundations of most Western countries seem quite solid. But it is already known that moments of anxiety, crisis or threat are a perfect cultivation for these thinkers, for their acolytes and for those who end up surrendering to them and their absolute ideals.
You can buy the book Reckless thinkers, a very interesting essay by Mark Lilla, here: