491
TIL During the Siege of Sarajevo, rich people paid to travel there and kill civilians
(en.wikipedia.org)
this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2026
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It's a self selecting position. Political positions reward the cutthroats, the ones who will make backroom deals and compromise their morals.
Kind and considerate people are rarely in power, and never for long. You will be replaced if you don't "play the game".
In the Lord of the Rings example, looking exclusively at humans here, only the lords were allowed to wear the rings of power. Hobbits and peasants were not given rings. Even the country town's seventh prince, who would have made the ideal king, was not given a ring. Only the people already at the top, who already had to fight their brothers and sisters for succession of the throne, who were used to political games and dealing with the devil, got the rings. Of course they became evil; evil was already within them.
Sauron gave rings of power to political leaders because he wanted to usurp their political power, not because they had earned them. They just happened to be the type of person he was targeting. Similar rings could perhaps have been mass manufactured and distributed to the masses, but when power is concentrated, it makes more sense to corrupt the locus of power than to faff about with corrupting the commoners directly.
Do you think the nazgul were all born evil?
I'm a bit confused by this reply, sorry. We seem to agree? Or are you saying that the kings were good before getting the rings?
I kind of feel like the LOTR metaphor barely works in this thread context anyway, since they had a mind control element to them. Most people in power in reality seem to become evil perfectly fine without any mind control at all (that we know of).
That's ok, I was confused by your reply too, and I was trying to guess at what you meant. Your last sentence seemed to imply that evil people naturally rise to power and were only given rings because they were already evil and were therefore Sauron's natural allies. Where I was headed with my reply was that it doesn't really matter if the ringwraiths were good or evil before they received the rings, because the purpose of the ring was to convert all that they were, political power, personal identity, and all, to the service of Sauron's will.
On the subject of mind control: The Nazgul purportedly can't resist the will of Sauron (at least not by the time of the events of LotR), but many characters (Bilbo, Gandalf, Galadriel, Faramir, Sam) willingly refuse to take the ring even for a moment, and some can even willingly give it up after they've possessed it. I'd call what the rings do "influence" or "temptation" before I called it mind control. The Nazgul cannot resist Sauron because they can no longer imagine themselves not in thrall to him. Sauron doesn't mind control them in the classic sense; he doesn't have to.