There’s many answers but I genuinely fear they’re too lost in the weeds of abstraction.
The truth is still simple; Power is useless to the common* (read: average and averagely distributed) person. It doesn’t grow crops, shoe horses, or help your fellow man, inherently.
The common person has real concerns to worry about, leaving the search of the trappings of power for the uncommon.
Uncommonly good* (read: beneficial for the doer and the common person) is harder than uncommonly evil* (read: beneficial for the doer but detrimental to the common person); this is simply entropy, and it readily maps to humankind’s so called capacity for thought.
That it only takes a bit of shared effort to make lasting structures to help others and fight off sociological entropy is an uncommonly good realization:
The common man has labors to do, the uncommonly good servant a statistical rarity and the uncommonly evil servants and the structures they engender to keep them in support (entropy begets entropy) a hurdle that by the point of realization takes an uncommonly amount of uncommon good to overcome.
TL;DR: Human nature + time + compounding apathy in those in a position to nudge things when they were easier to nudge = a need for collective awakening to course correct. We’ve gilded the lily on our sociological underpinnings but have yet to truly revolutionize, only iterate.
I think I can relate, somewhat. It’s not easy, constantly being rational in the face of evil depravity. A just mind seeking a clean pattern of cause and effect can’t be blamed when it starts asking “where is the sword of the innocent”, and I personally get how that morphs to “Ok, will somebody give me the sword?”.
I’m there myself today, on other news. Beware the thoughts, however. There’s a difference between wanting to wield a sword to protect and one to punish; one is swift and necessary, the other opens the window to festering and becoming the abyss.
I wouldn’t weep at a swift and ignominious end now, and I certainly would personally swing down that figurative blade and go to sleep soundly but never with the idea the monster could be made to comprehend if I taint myself to the same level of depravity, best remain a monster-lite. Because even that course of action I’d take is not without its own brand of reprehensible in the just world I’d rather live in.