I find some senior Tories very scary.
In relation to my views on change, I think that my sense that people can change, which may mean backing off from views once held or intensifying them, means that I don't just look at how nasty any are now, but consider how nasty they might be.
As for harming others, I'm minded of the infamous experiment in which participants were supposedly 'teaching' someone in another room with an audio link, that other person being an actor, and being encouraged to give the person electric shocks if they didn't do as required. The actor expressed more and more pain and distress. But it was, from the participants' perspective, ok, because it was part of a proper, authorised experiment.
Then I switch my mind to that research after WW2, where people involved in the holocaust were interviewed. A German soldier who shot Jewish children when their families were being moved to concentration camps justified it on the basis that if he hadn't shot them, what they'd have suffered would have been far worse.
And rich people justify what they do. Look at all their wonderful philanthropy. Whilst people argue over the likes of Colston and the slavery aspect, let's consider an aspect that is, I believe, classic of so many rich philanthropists now - paying ordinary workers poor wages to work in poor conditions, then feeling good about providing the facilities the philanthropist thinks they should have.
And politicians? Yes, be a patron of a good cause or two. But don't spend much money on it unless you get a kick out of doing so, otherwise, what's the point in being a politician?
I conceptualise most of the powerful people in our world as being compulsive hoarders of wealth and/or power (and of course, the two enmesh).
When we envisage compulsive hoarders, it's in the context usually of a documentary of a small house or maybe a flat full of rubbish, including a kitchen that probably makes a lot of viewers recoil. Well, it's a rare maker of a documentary about compulsive hoarding that shows a tidy house.
But consider this - there's many a person, particularly but not only middle class, with a house large enough to accommodate wall upon wall covered in bookcases full of books they're never going to read again. But maybe there are lots of complete sets of whatever. And the kitchen? Well it doesn't look cluttered because it's large with loads of cupboards and maybe a walk-in utility room and/or pantry. You can spread the same amount of clutter round a room and it looks ok or not depending on the size of the room and the furniture. 100 pieces of unwashed crockery laid out neatly out on a dining table, a kitchen table and a food preparation counter look like nothing. In a small place, a quarter or less of that can make you look like you're surrounded by clutter. Yet the supposedly neatly laid out stuff might have been there for ages, or not need to be there etc.
You can hoard power that way. Who sees it as hoarding if you do it tidily?
