There is historical precedent for groups advocating equality, altruism, and other humanitarian causes to do a lot of damage and start guillotining people. You would probably be horrified and step off the train before it got to that point. But it's important to understand the failure modes of egalitarian, altruistic movements.
The French Revolution, and Russian Revolution / Soviet Union ran into these failure modes where they started killing lots of people. After slavery was abolished in the US, around one quarter of the freed slaves died.
These events were all horrible disasters from a humanitarian perspective. Yet I doubt that the original French Revolutionaries planned from the start to execute the aristocracy, and then execute many of their own factions for supposedly being counter-revolutionaries. I don't think Marx ever intended for the Russian Revolution and Soviet Union to have a high death toll. I don't think the original abolitionists ever expected the bloody Civil War followed by 25% of the former slaves dying.
Perhaps, once a movement for egalitarianism and altruism got started, an ideological death spiral caused so much polarization that it was impossible to stop people from going overboard and extending the movement's mandate in a violent direction. Perhaps at first, they tried to persuade their opponents to help them towards the better new world. When persuasion failed, they tried suppression. And when suppression failed, someone proposed violence, and nobody could stop them in such a polarized environment.
Somehow, altruism can turn pathological, and well-intentioned interventions have historically resulted in disastrous side-effects or externalities. That's why some people are cynical about altruistic political attitudes.
My model is that these revolutions created a power vacuum that got filled up. Whenever a revolution creates a power vacuum, you're kinda rolling the dice on the quality of the institutions that grow up in that power vacuum. The United States had a revolution, but it got lucky in that the institutions resulting from that revolution turned out to be pretty good, good enough that they put the US on the path to being the world's dominant power a few centuries later. The US could have gotten unlucky if local military hero George Washington had declared himse...
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