[Psychology] Does Power Corrupt?

I tend to answer any questions like this with a flippant reply - hence first post.

I certainly don't class myself anywhere near having the wisdom to add in anything beyond what other, more wiser, folks have already provided in the past.

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power. Abraham Lincoln

Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power. George Bernard Shaw

Trying to find my fave quote about this sort of thing I came across the below.

Power will intoxicate the best hearts, as wine the strongest heads. No man is wise enough, nor good enough to be trusted with unlimited power. Charles Caleb Colton

That nicely sums up my point of view.

As to my fave quote about power (which I still can't find), it goes along this sort of line.

Never give power to those who seek it.

BTW is there any forum moderator positions going?

Parson said:

This is one of the examples that show that the saying power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely is a strong tendency, but not an absolute. I personally think that his refusing to run for a third term as President was at least as surprising as his resignation as General.

(Aside: Did you know that Washington was the richest American President ever, until Trump was elected?)

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I didn't know he was the richest. I didn't know Mt. Vernon was that big!

By the way, for a research paper in college, I chose to research the origins of several revolutionary war veteran plaques in an old rundown graveyard outside an old rundown remains of a church. As it turned out, they were members of the local militia whose colones received two letters directly from Washington a week before the crossing of the Delaware. the first expressed so eloquently his great displeasure at the failure of the militias of Pennsylvania to turn out upon his requests. The second was stating that congress granted him authority over them (LOL!). The writing was so eloquent and beautiful. It was like my brain was making love to a marshmallow.

Mike Donoghue said:

I didn't know he was the richest. I didn't know Mt. Vernon was that big!

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Yes, Mount Vernon (largely inherited through Martha) is the major source of his wealth and less nobly, slaves and for a good number of years he was the largest distiller of Rye whisky in the United States.

The fear of losing power can lead to corruption.

Glitch said:

The fear of losing power can lead to corruption.

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I agree. Power is fleeting, as it attracts ambitious, driven people who always outnumber the amount of power available. A powerful person never has long enough to achieve their goals and there are always more goals. And they come to believe they are the only people who can achieve them. The longer they last in power, the more they are challenged by, and occupied fighting, rivals and the less time they have to dedicate to their increasing number of goals. This results in more and more desperate methods - including corruption - being employed to retain power, which ultimately leads to it being removed from them.

This is why you often see leaders in democracies (those without fixed terms) staying on far too long and being unceremoniously dumped. Dictators can last longer if they have the right balance of intelligence and brutality, but their downfall is usually more spectacular and lethal.

While this is interesting, I'm not convinced that it and similar questions are really all that helpful from a novel-writing perspective except for general background. The question should surely be "Is this character corrupted by power?" or maybe "Is this character the sort of person likely to be corrupted by power and, if so, what happens to them?" While it's important for the background to be believable, unless the characters are meant to be representative of general types of people (which isn't done very much, especially outside of polemical books) I think it's more useful to be more specific.

I see it more cynically, as do some other posters: I think people have a variety of unsavory aspects to their personality. In normal circumstances, you depend on smoothly functioning with your surroundings (family, coworkers, bosses, etc) to have a successful life. This necessity makes us suppress the occasional surges of bad thoughts that co-exist in everyone. Maybe your boss really is a jerk and you imagine cursing him or her out in front of everyone... but you know you can’t, really. Not if you want to continue to have a stable income.

The more money or power you have, the less you rely on people around you, and the more you can separate yourself from the cogs of the system. With this freedom comes a lesser pressure to “behave.” The social/practical consequences lessen the more power and money you gain, allowing that darker side more liberty.

This combines with the fact that in order to get money and power, it often requires you to be slightly more ruthless than the next person. Statistically, this means the most powerful people are also more likely to have louder dark voices.

Of course there are plenty of wealthy and powerful people who do not behave in a corrupted manner (Bill Gates, say) so I don’t think its some kind of inexorable thing.

Toby, I do think it's relevant, for the reason I mentioned: if we merely say "power corrupts" then we lose all the nuance. It's how this particular person went bad that makes for the interesting story. I think you and I are saying much the same thing.

zmunkz makes an excellent point because he talks about *how* someone might be corrupted. I think it's a good analysis ... for modern society. When wealth--and, more importantly, power and authority--is inherited, then the predicate about being ruthless is less true. Moreover, the ideology (as distinct from practice) of the pre-modern aristocrat had the noble deeply embedded in society, with all sorts of responsibilities and obligations--the latter captured in the phrase noblesse oblige. So, weirdly, one could make the case that power was actually less corrupting in a traditional aristocracy than in a modern capitalist society. I don't think I'd try to defend that historically, but it's a notion that tickles me.

But it does go back to the crucial point, that we cannot generalize about power across time and cultures. And as writers, we ought not.

sknox said:

it does go back to the crucial point, that we cannot generalize about power across time and cultures. And as writers, we ought not.

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Sometimes you have to as readers will expect certain characters to behave it certain ways based on their own real life. Go too far beyond this and you may find that readers will reject the view you are giving as being uncharacteristic - weird to say with this being a fantasy scifi forum

That's not to say don't mix things up but I'd argue the majority of readers expect to see certain types, they enjoy finding them and feel comfortable enough to continue reading because they are there.

Lure them in and then add the subtle twist.

zmunkz said:

The more money or power you have, the less you rely on people around you, and the more you can separate yourself from the cogs of the system. With this freedom comes a lesser pressure to “behave.” The social/practical consequences lessen the more power and money you gain, allowing that darker side more liberty.

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My problem with this post comes with the word "behave." Personally, I would jump through certain hoops because of what people could do for me or to me. But with the really big issues of morality, my behavior is not much motivated by money, but hugely by the Christian ethic of right and wrong. And I have a hard time believing that most people don't have some, perhaps many, behaviors that are more dictated by their sense of right and wrong than simply what they are going to get out of it.

Glitch said:

The fear of losing power can lead to corruption.

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This, but also the corrupted and selfish often strive for power* for their own aggrandisement and gain, as well as the fear of others having something they might not. To paraphrase Heinlein**: anyone wanting power or political office should automatically be barred from it. Perhaps not 100% true, but a pretty good starting point.

*Not that the power they seek is true power. It's a fleeting illusion. Sic transit gloria mundi, et cetera. (That's the end of my philosophicating. )
**it surprises a few people that I know his work, but he was surprisingly egalitarian and tolerant, in some respects.


@Parson, I don't regard myself as a good person, but I try to do the right thing - treat others as I'd like to be treated, and so on. I think most people do the same: they try, but just fall short sometimes, even often. It's only a relative few who are deliberately and by design uncaring, amoral, or sociopathic. Of course, the trying-to-be-good members of society can be manipulated into allowing their fears and less savoury aspects to take precedence. Even more so when it's not on a one-to-one interaction but in relation to strangers, and 'them', 'over there', who do/wear/talk/eat/think 'that'.

I've worked in large companies and been interested to see the impact of the expectation of the company on managers - as in getting managers to get the people they manage to work long hours, longer than is necessarily good for their health whether using the carrot or the stick method. You can see people change as they go higher up the ladder - and if they don't change, in general they don't go higher up. There can be honourable exceptions to this, but I have seen former colleagues who were perfectly reasonable people as colleagues, become guarded, start talking like management text books and be generally moulded into what the company thinks it needs.
I also remember in one company that was taken over, a senior manager who'd been a notorious axe man, hit a glass ceiling as no-one who wasn't of the new company got to go any higher. Overnight he turned into a much nicer person, when he had no rungs to reach.

Further thoughts - recently watched a documentary on the growth of Ancient Athens - and at the start of the democracy, they elected people to all the positions of power with regular change-overs. Then they found that some of the people elected were just not able to do the job - so they modified the system.
Monastries and Convents - depending on the rules of the order, would also do a regular change-over on all the jobs - Bursar, running the hospital and the like. Everyone was supposed to be equal brothers/sisters so you took turns.

Sometimes it is not exactly corruption in a position of power - but the sense of it being your territory and that can grow with time. That leads to authoritarianism and assuming you know best and not wanting to listen to other people or even reacting to what are intended as helpful comments as being a challenge to your authority. It is not corruption in terms of taking bribes or exactly misusing power, but it is a way in which power changes people. And that being said, sometimes the helpful comments are really not helpful at all, they just show how ignorant the speaker is - but being polite to them when they are the fifth idiot who has said that today can be a big effort.

My reference was towards how one little indiscretion could seem harmless at first.

Parson said:

And I have a hard time believing that most people don't have some, perhaps many, behaviors that are more dictated by their sense of right and wrong than simply what they are going to get out of it.

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I'd like to agree, I'd like to believe in that sense of right/wrong, I hope that I live 99% of the time to those ideals, I certainly try to.

However, at the other end of the spectrum we are still just animals and inbuilt within the core is a powerful sense of self preservation. It's an urge that can't be helped and no one should ever be blamed for listening to it. I have the utmost respect for those that have the strength of will to suppress this urge for the betterment of others and to the detriment or potential detriment to themselves.

There are those though who I'd like to suggest embrace this self preservation. The me first attitude. They are the ones who tend to seek out the power as a way of ensuring their own survival. When that does occur would you honestly believe anyone with that sort of attitude to fully obey the rules? I think not.

I'm sure everyone who reads this post knows at least one person like that.

Luiglin said:

However, at the other end of the spectrum we are still just animals and inbuilt within the core is a powerful sense of self preservation. It's an urge that can't be helped and no one should ever be blamed for listening to it. I have the utmost respect for those that have the strength of will to suppress this urge for the betterment of others and to the detriment or potential detriment to themselves.

There are those though who I'd like to suggest embrace this self preservation. The me first attitude.

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I'd point out that many animals - humans included - have the instinct to seek out others of their kind, to better serve that self-preservation.

I would further argue that self-preservation has little to do with being corrupt or not, and that the "me first" attitude is, in actuality, a deterrent to the self-preservation sought. In tribal animals, the success of the whole enhances the survival of the individuals within. Forgetting this truth - which I fear our society is in danger of doing - would literally result in the destruction of the group, to the detriment of the individuals.

Cathbad said:

I'm not so sure.

It seems it's the corrupt who seek out power.

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People with the best of intentions seek power too and more often then not , get ensnared and corrupted by it.

BAYLOR said:

People with the best of intentions seek power too and get ensured and corrupted by it.

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IMO, no one can be corrupted against their will - it would be quite the paradox!

Cathbad said:

IMO, no one can be corrupted against their will - it would be quite the paradox!

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Cathbad , anyone can choose of their own free will to walk with into hell with their eyes wide open.

"Choose" is correct.

I go back to the stuff I know. Medieval kings, dukes, etc. held their titles by heredity (mostly). Some rulers were good, some bad, a great many of them a mixed bag of both.

The stereotype of medieval monarchy is absolute rule, but that was never the case, not even in theory (divine right of kings is an early modern invention). But even restricting the examination to the theoretical powers of a king (let's leave out counts, dukes, margraves and such), it quickly becomes obvious that the claims of power far exceeded the actual exercise of power. Kings could never rely on how many of their men would turn up for a war, nor how long they would stay in the field. They were so bad at collecting taxes, they farmed the job out and most spent their reigns in debt. Their laws were cheerfully ignored throughout the realm. Enforcement was erratic and usually resented. Some kings were weaker than their vassals.

When I try to apply the phrase "power corrupts" to these men (and a few women), it simply falls apart.

Then I turn to other areas of life. Soldiers have power. Are they all corrupt? Parents have power. Teachers have power. In truth, almost everyone has some form of power. If I'm to take the phrase at face value, it's so universal as to be nearly meaningless, as it leaves both the noun and the verb undefined.

That said, there's no denying the observations made by some here. They present their own evidence. To me, as a writer, this raises really interesting questions. Are there different kinds of power? Is there a difference between authority and power? Is power the successful exercise of authority? If there is such a thing as abuse of power, that implies there's such a thing as the good use of power. Does that also corrupt? And what do we mean by corruption here? There are many ways in which a human being can go wrong. Is the corruption beyond remedy? Is there no coming back from power? Is redemption denied the mighty? Is there even such a thing as absolute power, or is power on an infinite scale? Whatever does absolute corruption look like?

There are a thousand stories within each of these questions, and I've barely scratched the surface. I would quibble with the subject line here. The aphorism about absolute power is not a case of psychology. It's philosophy. Psychology deals with real human beings, who are never absolute.