Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia was an event of staggering horror, yet it stands as more than just a case of mass death; it’s a reflection of how ideology, unchecked power, and human blindness to atrocity come together in ways that defy simple understanding. The question isn’t just why this happened—because we already know the bones of it. But why do we keep letting these things happen? Why does the world stand by, indifferent, caught in the inertia of its own myths and lies? And deeper still: why do people like Pol Pot, like Hitler, like Stalin, so often emerge from the same ground of revolution, of hope, of the idea that something better, something purer, can only be birthed through fire and blood?

Pol Pot envisioned a utopia—an agrarian paradise stripped of urban decay, of intellectualism, of modernity itself. And in the madness of that vision, he killed millions. But the core of it wasn’t madness. It was ideological extremism, the belief that society could be cleansed through violence, that human beings could be remade by breaking them apart. And in that belief, we see the ancient human impulse to divide the world into the pure and impure, the worthy and the damned. Pol Pot took this impulse to its extreme, deciding that to save the soul of his nation, he had to slaughter those who threatened it. The urban intellectuals, the city dwellers, the educated—all of these were marked for death, not because they had done anything wrong, but because they represented everything his vision could not tolerate.

And here’s where it gets trickier, because it’s not just about power or control, though that’s part of it. Genocides like this one happen because people fall in love with the idea of purity, with the simplicity of a world divided between the chosen and the unclean. Pol Pot saw his mission as a way to purify Cambodia, to strip it of contamination. But that idea, the notion of purity, is a poison we see across history. It was there when Hitler marched Jews and others to the gas chambers. It was there when Stalin purged millions to protect his vision of Soviet perfection. It’s there in modern genocides too—the Rwandan genocide, where Hutus turned on their Tutsi neighbors, calling them cockroaches, stripping them of their humanity in the most visceral sense.

Pol Pot is just one piece of this larger puzzle, but he embodies a truth we like to look away from: genocide doesn’t require chaos. It doesn’t emerge from anarchy or madness. It grows out of order, out of planning, out of meticulous belief systems. It grows when people are willing to trade reality for myth—when the myth of the better future, of the utopia, of the nation cleansed of its impurities, becomes more real than the lives of the people in front of you. Pol Pot didn’t kill randomly. He killed to achieve a vision. His was a calculated, purposeful genocide—driven by an idea, not by chaos.

But here’s the part that bites at the soul: the world knew. The world knew something was happening, but the story of Cambodia didn’t fit the narratives that were palatable at the time. The Vietnam War had just ended, and nobody was interested in another Southeast Asian crisis. The Cold War created all sorts of strange bedfellows—China supported the Khmer Rouge because it suited their rivalry with Vietnam. The U.S., battered by the loss in Vietnam, didn’t want to get involved. The lies we tell ourselves—about what’s important, about what’s a “real” threat—are just as deadly as the regimes that commit the crimes. Realpolitik means people were willing to turn a blind eye, to sacrifice the truth for political convenience.

This is the deeper horror: the silence that surrounds genocides. Rwanda in 1994—again, the world stood by while nearly a million people were butchered in 100 days. The same story. We knew. We heard. We looked away. Why? Because Rwanda didn’t fit the grand narratives of global politics at the time. Because the U.N., the U.S., the world’s powers decided it wasn’t worth the cost to intervene. And isn’t that the pattern? The world only looks at genocide when it’s convenient. Bosnia, Rwanda, Myanmar. There’s a common thread. It’s not enough to know about genocide. You have to care, and caring often gets sacrificed for more “pressing” matters.

Look at China today, the Uighur genocide happening right now.

We hear reports of concentration camps, forced sterilizations, cultural erasure, but the global response is muted.

Why? Because China holds too much power, economically and politically.

And so, once again, we trade human lives for comfort, for convenience. We’ve seen this in history—over and over again. The Ottoman Empire with the Armenian Genocide. East Timor when Indonesia wiped out a generation of Timorese. Stalin’s purges, where millions starved or disappeared into the night.

There’s always a reason, isn’t there? Why we didn’t stop it sooner. Why we didn’t get involved. Why it wasn’t our responsibility. But all those reasons fall apart under the weight of what we know happens in those dark places when no one is watching, or worse, when everyone is watching and no one is doing anything.

And it’s not just the grand scale of genocide that matters—it’s the ideological infrastructure that allows it to happen, the small steps that normalize cruelty, that make the unthinkable seem inevitable. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge didn’t start with the killing fields. They started with ideas. Ideas that people bought into, ideas that seemed to make sense in the warped logic of a broken world.

What’s terrifying is how easily it all happens. Dehumanization is simple, really. Strip people of their identity, their names, their humanity. Call them cockroaches, vermin, enemies of the people. Then it’s not killing—it’s just pest control. It’s making the world clean again. That’s how it works. That’s how it always works.

Pol Pot, Hitler, Stalin—they are the names we remember. But they were just people who embodied larger forces. The real danger, the real horror, is that these forces—ideological purity, dehumanization, unchecked power—are always there, lurking, waiting for someone to pick them up again. And the world, time and again, pretends it doesn’t see.

In this, the lesson of Pol Pot’s genocide is not just about Cambodia. It’s about the patterns that run through history, the lies we tell ourselves to avoid confronting the truth. It’s about the way we allow atrocities to happen because they don’t fit into the stories we want to believe. And maybe most damning of all, it’s about how easily we fall into the same traps, again and again, because we refuse to learn.

There’s a narrative we’ve been fed for so long that it’s hard to untangle: the idea that power represents the people. It’s an old, seductive myth, one we see in every page of history, yet when you pull at the edges, it unravels into something darker. Power, in its raw form, doesn’t serve the people—it serves itself. And when we look at the world’s most brutal regimes, the visionaries-turned-dictators, the so-called builders of the future who leave only ruin in their wake, we start to see the lie that power and the people are ever truly aligned.

Consider the architects of some of history’s greatest destruction—Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler—and how they’ve been condemned for their actions, yet what they leave behind is a blueprint of how systems of power twist potential into destruction. These men, and those like them, always start with grand ideas: the promise of a perfect society, a utopia where everyone thrives. But utopia is always built on the bones of someone. And the question we rarely ask is whether this pursuit of some greater good, this tearing down of what exists in favor of an imagined future, inherently corrupts the very potential it claims to cultivate.

Look at Pol Pot’s Cambodia—his vision was to tear down the old world entirely, to return society to a pure agrarian state. A Year Zero, as if the past, with all its complexity, with all its humanity, could be wiped clean and something better could rise from the ashes. But who decides what gets burned and what remains? It’s always the powerful. The few who claim they know what’s best for the many. And the irony is that the greatest potential, the brightest futures, often get destroyed not by the masses, but by those in power who insist on controlling the narrative of progress.

When Pol Pot emptied the cities, slaughtered intellectuals, starved millions in his quest for purity, what was really at stake wasn’t just the lives lost—it was the potential of Cambodia itself, a rich, complex society reduced to ash under the guise of salvation. It’s the same story with Stalin’s purges, with Mao’s Cultural Revolution—each one a dismantling of society in the name of some higher goal, some future vision. But when you strip away the ideology, it’s power protecting itself, power tearing down what could have been in favor of maintaining control.

And then we have the idea that power represents the people, that the state or the leader embodies the will of the nation. It’s a comforting lie, but one that often blinds us to the true dynamics at play. Power, in almost every case, ends up representing itself. It becomes an entity all its own, concerned with self-preservation above all else. The people—the masses who supposedly benefit from this power—are often the ones sacrificed first. Their potential, their futures, their hopes are sold for the promise of something better, and they’re left to pick up the pieces when the grand narrative collapses.

The world that has the greatest potential is often the one torn down the fastest because potential is dangerous to those in power. Potential means unpredictability, it means change. A society that embraces its potential is a society that can’t be easily controlled. Pol Pot didn’t just kill people—he killed ideas, he killed possibilities. The same with Stalin and Mao. Their purges weren’t just about eliminating threats—they were about eliminating the unpredictable, the intellectual, the creative forces that might one day rise up and challenge the vision of the future these men were so obsessed with maintaining.

We often hear about these figures in terms of their moral failings, their crimes against humanity. But it’s not just about the bloodshed—it’s about the crime against potential, against what could have been. When Pol Pot emptied Cambodia’s cities, he wasn’t just erasing the present, he was erasing the future—the future artists, scientists, thinkers, leaders that could have taken Cambodia in directions Pol Pot couldn’t even imagine. His quest for purity wasn’t about creation; it was about limiting creation, about defining what could and couldn’t exist under his regime.

And this is the story we see repeated across history: potential is dangerous, and those in power will always seek to contain it, control it, or destroy it if they must. The same forces that should foster growth and innovation are often the first to stamp them out. The great developers, the visionaries, are often remembered not for what they built, but for what they destroyed in the process of building.

Now, imagine a world where potential was nurtured rather than feared, where power wasn’t the driving force but something else—collaboration, diversity of thought, the willingness to let things evolve without forcing them into rigid structures. It’s hypothetical, yes, but it’s not impossible. It’s just that history shows us that those who try to tear down everything in pursuit of a perfect vision often destroy the very thing that could have made that vision real.

What if Pol Pot hadn’t seen the intellectuals as enemies? What if he had embraced the complexity of his society rather than trying to simplify it into a rural utopia? What if the visionaries of the past hadn’t turned their dreams into nightmares by insisting that only their version of the future was the correct one? The greatest potential is found in the unpredictable, the messy, the uncontrolled, but power never likes messy. Power likes order. It likes to define, to restrict, to tear down what doesn’t fit neatly into its plans.

And this is why power rarely represents the people. Power represents itself. It represents the narrative that those in control want to sustain. The people, with all their potential, their unpredictable energy, their ability to shape the future in ways no one can predict—that’s what power fears. And so, time and again, we see the same story: the greatest potential, the brightest possibilities, are torn down, crushed under the weight of those who claim to know best.

In the end, it’s not just about the crimes committed, the genocides, the purges—it’s about the loss of what could have been. The futures we’ll never know because they were erased by those too afraid of a world they couldn’t control. That’s the real tragedy of power—the way it claims to serve the people while systematically destroying the very essence of what makes people free, what makes societies great, what makes the future worth fighting for.

The patterns we observe between societies that are “killing it”—thriving, innovating, growing—and those that are being killed—dismantled, decaying, collapsing—aren’t just the swings of a pendulum. They’re the result of deeper forces, often rooted in how power interacts with potential, how control either stifles or nurtures the unpredictable growth that drives progress.

Thriving Societies: When Potential Flourishes

When societies are “killing it,” they’re in a state where potential is being unleashed rather than suppressed. These are moments where creativity, innovation, and a certain openness to the unpredictable are embraced. Think of the Renaissance in Europe, the Golden Age of Islam, or the Technological Booms in the U.S. after World War II. In these moments, the society isn’t just surviving; it’s tapping into something deeper—an engine of ideas, creativity, and diversity.

There’s a pattern here. Societies that thrive don’t fear change or uncertainty—they harness it. They don’t clamp down on divergent thinking, but instead encourage it. Look at the Italian city-states during the Renaissance: they were competitive, they were chaotic, but they were also incredibly productive. Artists, scientists, philosophers—these were the people driving progress. The Medici and other patrons of the arts weren’t trying to control every brushstroke or idea—they were funding potential, knowing that in the chaos of experimentation lay the seeds of greatness.

Similarly, during the Golden Age of Islam, scholars from different parts of the world—Greeks, Persians, Arabs, Indians—were translating texts, exchanging ideas, building on each other’s work. The society wasn’t locked into a single narrative of what was “acceptable” knowledge. It was a synthesis, a confluence of cultures, ideas, and sciences, and the result was a society that made enormous strides in mathematics, medicine, astronomy, and philosophy.

These societies were “killing it” because they were willing to embrace plurality, complexity, and the unknown. They didn’t see potential as a threat; they saw it as a resource. And that’s the crucial difference.

Dying Societies: When Potential is Stifled

On the flip side, when societies start to collapse, there’s a clear pattern of stifling potential. The forces in power, whether political or cultural, become obsessed with control, with maintaining the status quo, with preserving their version of what the world should be. And in doing so, they choke off the very life force of the society—the unpredictable, the creative, the disruptive.

Take the Soviet Union during the latter half of the 20th century. Early on, the Soviet Union was a powerhouse of industry and technological development. But as the regime became more paranoid and more obsessed with control, the cracks began to show. Stalin’s purges wiped out not just political opponents, but scientists, intellectuals, and anyone seen as a threat to the rigid ideology of the state. The Soviet Union, in its quest for ideological purity and absolute control, effectively destroyed its own potential. By the time the regime fell, it wasn’t just because of economic collapse—it was because the society had stagnated, choked by its own refusal to let people think, create, and push boundaries.

Another example is the decline of Rome. In its early days, Rome thrived on a mix of conquest, cultural assimilation, and civic innovation. But as the empire grew, so did the corruption, the bureaucratic bloat, and the obsession with maintaining power. The focus shifted from expansion and innovation to maintaining control. Wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few, political infighting became rampant, and the energy that had once driven Rome forward was replaced by a kind of existential inertia. Rome didn’t fall in a single cataclysmic event—it eroded over centuries, as the forces that once drove its growth were systematically suppressed.

When societies are being killed, you see a closing of openness, a fear of the new, and an emphasis on conformity. Dissent is punished, not because it’s dangerous in itself, but because it represents the unknown. Those in power begin to see the creative forces of society—artists, thinkers, scientists—not as assets, but as threats. They become obsessed with purity, with creating a version of society that is uniform, controllable, and predictable.

This is where we return to the idea of dehumanization. In dying societies, you start to see a rise in us vs. them narratives. Whether it’s intellectuals, ethnic minorities, or political dissidents, those who don’t fit the rigid mold are labeled as enemies, as obstacles to the perfect society. In the Soviet Union, this was the kulaks and the intelligentsia; in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, it was anyone who was educated or urban; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jews, Roma, and anyone who didn’t fit the Aryan ideal. These societies fall because they are killing their own future, systematically erasing the diversity of thought, culture, and creativity that fuels human progress.

What drives this shift from thriving to dying? It’s always the same thing: fear. Fear of losing power. Fear of the unknown. Fear of change. Power, when unchecked, becomes paranoid. Those in control begin to believe that their vision is the only possible future, and any deviation from that vision becomes a threat. This is the core of authoritarianism—the belief that order and control are more important than growth, that maintaining the system is more valuable than allowing it to evolve.

Thriving societies are willing to take risks. They understand that chaos is part of growth, that disruption leads to innovation, and that allowing multiple voices to shape the future creates a stronger, more resilient whole. Dying societies, on the other hand, try to freeze time. They believe that the world can be controlled, that the future can be shaped into a single, linear narrative. And in doing so, they smother the very forces that could save them.

Look at the United States post-World War II. The country was thriving in part because it embraced a kind of creative destruction—new industries were rising, civil rights movements were challenging old norms, and the space race sparked a boom in technological innovation. But as we move forward, we see echoes of the same patterns that have led other societies to their deaths: political polarization, a fear of change, a growing obsession with control over freedom, and a distrust of intellectualism and science. These are the warning signs of a society beginning to close off its potential.

When Societies Kill It vs. Get Killed

Ultimately, societies that thrive are those that understand the balance between order and chaos, between control and freedom. They embrace complexity rather than trying to simplify the world into a single vision. They let potential flourish, even when it’s unpredictable, even when it threatens the status quo.

But societies that collapse do so because they can’t handle the tension between the known and the unknown. They try to eliminate uncertainty, to control the uncontrollable, and in doing so, they destroy the very thing that gives them life.

The patterns are clear: when societies are thriving, they are open, creative, and willing to take risks. When they are dying, they are closed, paranoid, and obsessed with maintaining control at the expense of growth. The question is whether we, as a global society, can learn to embrace the messy, sprawling potential that drives true progress—or whether we’ll continue to let fear and power choke the life out of us, one society at a time.