Power

Power has structural properties that corrupt reliably, regardless of person. The moment you hold power over others and can control resources, opportunities, or consequences, your relationship with reality begins to change, because power insulates. The higher you rise, the fewer people will tell you the truth, not because everyone around you inherently becomes dishonest, but because the incentive structure changes. Telling power what it wants to hear is safer than telling it what it needs to hear, and over time, the powerful person is surrounded by information that has been filtered, softened, and shaped by people who need something from them. The view from the top is not a clearer view, it is often curated.

Simultaneously, the actual problems that power is supposed to address recede from direct experience. The politician does not wait in queues, the executive does not feel the effects of certain policies, and the person at the top of any hierarchy is, almost by definition, the person least exposed to the problems they’re supposed to address and the consequences of decisions made by them. The further you are from a problem, the more abstract it becomes, increasing the chance of misinterpretation of what the problem actually was, and decreasing the chance and reasons to even give a shit about it. And this is just the best case scenario, assuming that powerful people are doing their best to remain noble, which is, unfortunately, almost never the case.

There is also what power does to the psychology of the person who has it. Studies on this are consistent enough to be taken seriously: power consistently reduces empathy, increases risk tolerance, and produces a tendency to see other people as instruments rather than people. These are cognitive shifts produced by the experience of having others depend on you, defer to you, and accommodate you over time. The mind adjusts to its conditions and power is a condition that adjusts the mind in predictable directions.

Incentives

Even a genuinely well intentioned person, once in power, faces an incentive structure that pulls consistently away from their original intentions. Ultimately, staying in power requires cooperation because no one rules alone. Behind every visible authority is a network of relationships, obligations, and mutual dependencies, including donors, allies, subordinates, higher authorities, and institutions, all of whom have their own interests, and all of whom must be kept sufficiently satisfied to maintain their cooperation. The moment you take a position that threatens the interests of a significant piece of the base (that largely put you and keeps you in power), you risk losing the support that keeps you in the position to do anything at all.

Thus, there is direct pressure to compromise. Not the productive kind of compromise that integrates valid yet competing interests, but the corrosive kind that trades away principle to preserve position. The policy gets softened, the accountability gets deferred, the person who was once the problem becomes an ally you cannot afford to lose, and each compromise makes the next one easier, because the precedent exists, and the justification is always available: I have to stay in power to do any good at all.

This is nearly inescapable by design. The person who refuses to compromise will almost always lose their position to someone who will. Anyone in power who promises to improve the conditions of people not in power by taking away from the powerful has to compete with power itself to do that, and they probably won’t agree. Institutions select for a particular kind of pragmatism that is difficult to distinguish from the outside as corruption, especially because, from the inside, it rarely feels like corruption, but like realism. You’re just doing what you have to do. There’s not much else you can do. The structure is designed against you, even if you have power.

Power is useful, and useful things tend to be taken advantage of. The person in power who could voluntarily limit their own authority almost never does, for a wide variety of reasons, internal and external, but mainly because more power means more capacity to reward allies, neutralize threats, and insulate the position. The incentive is always toward more, and the mechanisms that are supposed to check this, like accountability, transparency, and institutional constraints are all, conveniently, administered by people with the exact same incentives.

Abstraction

Direct abuse of power is real and problematic, but not the most common form. The more common form is indirect, gradual, and often invisible to the person committing it, because each use of power that goes unchecked establishes a new baseline. The person who once hesitated to use their position for personal advantage eventually stops hesitating, at least in the same way, not because they made a conscious decision to become corrupt, but because the hesitation wore away through repetition and the absence of consequence. The line moves, and it moves so gradually that the person standing at it rarely notices how far they are from where they started.

When you cannot see the harm you cause, and when it is absorbed by people far below you in the hierarchy, it is genuinely difficult to identify it as a problem. Ordinary people in positions of power regularly make decisions that devastate the people affected by them, yet sleep without difficulty afterward, because the abstraction and/or rationalization of harm is one of the most reliable features of hierarchical power.

Power literally creates access, and access creates temptation. Temptation, over time and in the absence of accountability, is eventually acted upon, not just by monsters, but by ordinary people who have been placed in conditions that ordinary people cannot fully resist. It may take time, but the pattern is always there. Even the person writing about all of this has observed the exact same patterns in myself in positions of power.

Irreplacability

Despite all of this, society still requires hierarchy to function. As The Myth but Necessity of Objectivity in Adaptivism and The Fallacy of Equality in Social Positioning argued, the alternative to structured authority is chaos, and in the absence of legitimate hierarchy, illegitimate hierarchy fills the gaps, which has none of the accountability mechanisms that legitimate institutions, however imperfect, at least theoretically provide.

Power also gets things done in a way that cannot be accomplished without coordination at impractical scales. Infrastructure, law, defense, management of shared resources, education, democratic processes, and economics, just to name a few, all require someone to make binding decisions, to enforce agreements, and to act on behalf of people who cannot individually affect systems on their own behalf. The question is never whether power should exist, because it always will, it needs to for our society to function. The question is how power should be structured, checked, and distributed to minimize the damage it reliably causes. It is an extremely complex problem that only gets more difficult to solve as the power becomes stronger, so I don’t really have an ideal way to design it outside of checks and balances that expect powerful people to be self interested and use that self interest to check other powerful people, creating a cycle that still involves self interested people, but whom are encouraged to check other powerful people, ensuring nobody can abuse it. But I’ll admit, this is still difficult to pull off because there’s nothing stopping powerful people from banding together to collectively promote their own interests.

In any case, this is why institutional design matters more than the character of individuals, because individuals will always be self interested by nature. A system that depends on its leaders being unusually virtuous is a fragile system, because virtue is not reliably distributed and power consistently degrades whatever virtues are present. A system that assumes its leaders will be self interested, that builds constraints accordingly, and that distributes power widely enough that no single point of failure can collapse the whole is more durable, not because it produces better people, but because it does not require them.

Corruption

Corruption will never cease to exist. As long as power exists, the incentives that produce corruption will exist alongside it by design. Even people who enter power with the clearest and best of intentions still face the pressure from others in power, the insulation from reality, the normalization of unfair compromises, and the psychological effects of sustained authority. Some will resist better than others, institutional design can raise the cost of corruption and lower the reward, and accountability mechanisms can catch and prevent more of it more often, but the underlying dynamic is not going anywhere because it is not produced by the wrong people being in power, it is produced by the nature of power itself.

What this means practically is that the appropriate perspective toward power is neither deference nor nihilism. Not the assumption that authority is legitimate because it exists, nor the assumption that authority is fundamentally corrupt and therefore nothing can improve. The appropriate perspective is sustained and specific skepticism applied equally regardless of whether the power in question belongs to people you agree with or not. Watch what power does, not only what it says. Notice the gap between stated intentions and actual decisions, between the problem that was named and the solution that was implemented, and between who bears the cost and who makes the choice. Question everything. These gaps are where the reality of power is, and they are present in every system, every institution, and every hierarchy that has ever existed. The more clearly you can see power for what it is, the better you can decide what to do about it.

Related Entries

Religion

Religion is a net negative on society.

There Is A War Going On For Your Mind

If you are thinking, you are winning.

The Myth but Necessity of Objectivity

Perfect objectivity is an unattainable ideal, pure subjectivity is an unsustainable reality. The best possible system balances between both, guided by principle.