Charismatic Hate

I recently finished watching the final season of The Expanse, a science-fiction series set about three centuries in the future. As SF goes, it's magnificent, miles ahead of the fantasy-posing-as-SF of the Star Trek variants or the juvenile silliness of Star Wars (both entertaining, but neither packing much heft), and I highly recommend it.

The last couple seasons (yes, this is something of a spoiler) are about the ascendance of a charismatic revolutionary who seeks to free the "Belters" (i.e. everyone who lives in the asteroid belt or beyond) from the yokes of the bureaucratic Earth and the militaristic Mars. That revolutionary, named Marco Inaros, was clearly modeled in part after everyone's favorite T-shirt communist.

And, indeed, Inaros' rhetoric and behavior mirror the mind-set of Guevara, as embodied in these quotes:

Blind hate against the enemy creates a forceful impulse that cracks the boundaries of natural human limitations, transforming the soldier in an effective, selective and cold killing machine. A people without hate cannot triumph against the adversary.

The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.

To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary - These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.

Throughout history, those with charisma have risen to lead, and throughout history, those charismatics with hate-filled hearts have committed terrible atrocities upon humanity by leveraging and stoking hate in others and of others.

What happens, though, when the revolution is achieved? Where does the hate go? Does it dissipate, like air from a balloon that's been un-knotted? Does it become happiness and comity?

Or does it seek new targets?

Hate is addictive. It needs counterbalancing, it needs to be subordinate to a positive goal, and it needs that same charismatic leader to turn it aside after goals have been achieved, lest it tear it all down.

Victories rooted in hate above all else are victories that will turn to punishment above all else. Glorious revolutions produce goon squads, and those insufficiently pure in commitment to the cause will be sought out and scourged in order to feed the hate-addiction.

A charismatic leader can turn that hate aside - if he wants to. Too often, though, such a person is also awash in ego and narcissism, a slave to his or her own legend, and will continue feeding the hate rather than settle to the difficult job of building and running the new society.

Look at the prime peddlers of hate in American society (after you've finished looking at this behavior throughout the world and history). Are they the sorts who'd strive to build harmony after they've won their revolution? Or are they the sorts to witch-hunt all who didn't blindly follow them down the path of destruction?