Reminds me of The Republic, where Plato describes an ideal government of selfless, enlightened rulers that would over time devolve down into democracy, which th

Reminds me of The Republic, where Plato describes an ideal government of selfless, enlightened rulers that would over time devolve down into democracy, which then would end up in tyranny, because the people would choose a tyrant to get rid of the chaos. Unrelated, I was unaware of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but that explains to me why communism ends up as a system of control: because it started out as a system of control in the first place. And why it's liberal (at least in the 1910s) intellectuals that were attracted to it: they were the ones ruling society in that system, which, as every intellectual knows, is The Way It Ought To Be. Of course, it got co-opted by the political sorts because control in the real world requires weapons not ideas.