We already know from history that that regimes may become so… self-serving and detached from reality, as one could put it… that they’ll feel the need to actively select against smart, sincere idealists or any permutation thereof.
Coincidentally, I was reading this excellent article about the mindset behind Leninism, and I felt like this passage was particularly insightful:
In his history of Marxism, Kołakowski explains some puzzling aspects of Bolshevik practice in these terms. Everyone understands why Bolsheviks shot liberals, socialist revolutionaries, Mensheviks, and Trotskyites. But what, he asks, was the point of turning the same fury on the Party itself, especially on its most loyal, Stalinists, who accepted Leninist-Stalinist ideology without question? Kołakowski observes that it is precisely the loyalty to the ideology that was the problem. Anyone who believed in the ideology might question the leader’s conformity to it. He might recognize that the Marxist-Leninist Party was acting against Marxism-Leninism as the Party itself defined it; or he might compare Stalin’s statements today with Stalin’s statements yesterday. ‘The citizen belongs to the state and must have no other loyalty, not even to the state ideology,’ Kołakowski observes.
Coincidentally, I was reading this excellent article about the mindset behind Leninism, and I felt like this passage was particularly insightful: