Give me the Death Note, I can be trusted to act rationally. The only “undeserving” to end up on it would be people who step through Metro doors and immediately stop, even though there’s people behind them.
More seriously I know the author has said it’s about power corrupting, but if that’s the story he wanted to tell then he should’ve chosen a different protagonist. Its also a silly mantra, we do not live in a Tolkien novel, power isn’t some supernatural force.
That’s a rather flawed conclusion to draw from the evidence - nothing in it excludes power being gained through preexisting corruption, and considering the context of the dominant economic system actively rewarding the exploitation of others it seems incredibly naive to think power inherently corrupts. Do you really think Musk, Trump, or Zuckerberg used to be fundamentally decent people and only went off the rails once they gained power?
I don’t think anyone is 100% good or 100% bad, or that a single factor in isolation reliably flips them from 100% good to 100% evil, no.
I just think outcomes are more sufficiently explained by looking at material conditions and systems larger than one individual’s actions or immutable characteristics determined at birth.
(In fact, I kinda thought the whole “systems and material conditions vs. individuals and immutable traits” thing was basically the philosophical origins of communism vs. fascism in a nutshell.)
Why do you think that’s what you’re doing here? You’ve ignored the material conditions in order to focus on the singular aspect of power as a corrupting force, completely ignoring the context of how they gained power in the first place, a direct indicator of previous corruption. Your claims assumes the corruption happens in a vacuum once they gain power.