Rapid ascent to power can exhaust ordinary ambitions and motives

Evidence

Lawrence wrote in 1929: “Anyone who had gone up so fast as I went …and had seen so much of the inside of the top of the world might well lose his aspirations, and get weary of the ordinary motives of action, which had moved him till he reached the top. I wasn’t King or Prime Minister, but I made ‘em, or played with them, and after that there wasn’t much more, in that direction, for me to do” (Letters, p. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2381

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to discussions of the psychology of revolutionary leadership and the ‘outsider’ figures in the totalitarian movements chapters. — connects to: Power is an addictive drug that shifts from serving dreams to serving itself. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 96; Achieving good goals requires acquiring and wielding power realistically