Every sufficiently stable system eventually produces the same crop.
Not merely a few fools by accident, but a steady procession of them, climbing ever higher until they occupy offices they have no business holding.
The process begins long before they arrive.
Decent people quietly leave the competition first. They have careers to build, families to raise, principles they are unwilling to auction off. They simply refuse to spend every waking hour mastering the dark arts of bureaucracy, manipulation, and institutional politics. That leaves the field increasingly open to those who view the system not as something to preserve, but as something to exploit.
Carlo Cipolla had a name for many of these people.
The Bandits.
Bandits are unpleasant, but they are understandable. They enrich themselves at the expense of others because they can. Given enough opportunity, they will squeeze every institution, every taxpayer, every shareholder, and every public programme until something valuable falls into their pockets. Their morality is negotiable. Their ambition is not.
Yet, paradoxically, the Bandit is rarely the true destroyer of a civilization.
He still requires the system to remain alive.
After all, a parasite has little interest in killing its host outright. A functioning economy, a functioning state, functioning institutions—these are the fields from which he harvests his wealth. Strip them bare too quickly and the feast ends for everyone, including himself. Under the right circumstances, the Bandit can therefore be reasoned with. Self-interest occasionally aligns with the common interest.
The problem is that circumstances are almost never right.
Because the Bandit’s greatest fear is not justice.
It is another Bandit.
He fears competitors more than prosecutors.
And that fear creates the perfect opening.
To protect himself from rivals, the Bandit increasingly rewards absolute loyalty over competence, ideology over reality, and obedience over independent thought. He surrounds himself with people who never question him, never challenge him, and never threaten his position.
That is where the Idiots enter.
Unlike the Bandit, the Idiot has no instinct for self-preservation beyond today’s narrative. Systemic survival means nothing to him. If preserving his worldview required reducing the economy to rubble, institutions to dust, and society itself to permanent dysfunction, he would accept the bargain without a moment’s hesitation.
In its most extreme form, the Idiot would happily watch the Earth become a barren rock, provided history eventually declared him morally correct.
Consequences do not exist in his universe.
Only virtue signalling does.
Only ideological victory.
Only the intoxicating certainty that he already possesses every answer.
That certainty is precisely what makes him impossible to negotiate with.
Facts are not evidence.
Facts are inconveniences.
Every contradiction is dismissed, every failure reinterpreted, every disaster blamed on insufficient commitment to the original idea. Reality itself becomes the enemy whenever it refuses to cooperate with the narrative.
This is why the Idiot is infinitely more dangerous than the Bandit.
The Bandit can sometimes be restrained by arithmetic.
The Idiot cannot.
The Bandit may steal the furniture.
The Idiot burns down the house simply to prove that fire was always progress.
And the great irony is that he rarely climbs the ladder on his own.
The Bandit builds it.
Terrified of other Bandits, he fills the institutions with people too incompetent to threaten him.
By the time he realizes they no longer care whether the institution survives, it is already too late.
The ladder has reached the roof.
The Idiots are in charge.
https://tilakdoshi.substack.com/p/yet-another-climate-activist-masquerading