"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely"
-Lord acton
n a recent article for “The Hindu”, journalist and
writer Hari Narayan quotes these famous words of Lord Acton from 1887. This idea about the negative effects of power on individuals is one shared by many in today’s society. The real danger with having power is the addictiveness of it. Much like an addiction to a drug or other substance, once we experience this psychological high of obtaining power, we want to get it again. In this quest for more power, we often find ourselves neglecting our responsibilities or manipulating others in order to “fast track” our results. This is something we often see in politicians and other high level members of our society. Once full of good intentions, these leaders lose sight of their original goals and ideas and begin to focus on themselves.
A Columbia University study looked at how the feeling of power affects us as human beings. They discovered that when we feel a sense of power we actually look down at others as having being less powerful. And even more than that, once we accept others as being less powerful than ourselves, we feed on this knowledge. Having this high rank or position becomes comfortable to us and we do whatever we have to in order to keep it that way, even if that means abandoning prior responsibilities or duties.
Now that our responsibilities have been neglected and power has become the main focus of our lives, the manipulation of others seems to become an increasingly more common practice. As stated before, when we gain power we begin to perceive others as having less and less of it. What happens when we develop this view is that we see these people as easy targets to manipulate in order to better things for ourselves. One of the more difficult things to do when you are a corrupt leader is to keep that corruption a secret. Part of the way leaders do that is by manipulating people into believing otherwise. They make false promises to inspire hope and create lies to cover up what they are actually doing. And the more people manipulate others the easier it becomes. In all of history there are very few leaders that haven’t fallen victim to this punishing cycle of corruption because of power.
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