Revolution and Replacement
brief musing on regime change
Doing things merely for the sake of doing them should not take precedence over reasons to embark legitimately. While this seems obvious on its face, folks indulge anyway. Guilty as charged. Change for the sake of change? Yeah. Being combative just to be combative? Yep. Expressing contrarianism simply to be a contrarian? Definitely this one.
There are times when change, combativeness, and contrarianism are necessary, sometimes all three simultaneously. And there are even times when legitimate reasons to express one or all three of these can be combined with portions of simply doing so for their own sake. Revolutions seem to possess this kind of combination, whether due to the philosophy of the revolution itself, or untrue believers hopping aboard a revolutionary cause simply because it looks like a good time.
The dirty little secret here is that revolutions, regardless of whether they lean more in the “for its own sake” or “legitimate” direction, never last forever. They must formalize into something lasting, lest they fall apart forever. For lasting replacement to transpire in an ordered manner, folks in the “for its own sake” camp must be relegated to “useful idiot” status and not be included among the new elite.