We are coordinated / The guard is manifold

Sitting on a balcony overlooking the bay, sipping a rum punch as the sun went down, I reflected that the exercise of power conveys a weird sensation of ease and tranquility. (I wonder how many of the ten men in the guardhouse will be alive tomorrow. It amuses me to think of them cutting each other's throats over a bottle of poisened spirits.)
The summary dispatching of the two Inquisitors was based on a precept long used by the Inquisition itself, which is in fact the way they were able to maintain their power despite widespread opposition and hatred. Brutal sanctions against a minority from which one is generically exempt cannot but produce a measure of satisfaction in those who are spared such treatment: "As decent clergymen you have nothing to fear." Thus the burning of the Jews, Moors, and Sodomites produces a certain sense of confort in those that are not Jews, Moors, or Sodomites: "This won't happen to me." To turn this mechanism back on the Inquisitors themselves gives me a feeling of taking over the office of fate. I am become the bad karma of Inquisition. I am allowing myself also the satisfaction that derives from a measure of hypocrisy, rather like the slow digestion of a good meal.

William S. Borroughs - Cities of the red night (1981)