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urban-fantasy-writer-astronaut:

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“power corrupts” always felt like a weird… inversion of causality

if people in power are corrupt, surely the most parsimonious explanation is that corruption is an effective means to power?

I mean, people in power also have more room to be corrupt. Like, it’s easier to be cruel if you won’t have to face or deal with the consequence, you know?

And you don’t have to worry about what other people think of you anymore.

see, i’ve been told that a more accurate description of this is that power doesn’t corrupt so much as power reveals.

given power, people apparently do whatever they want. this sounds simple, but consider how tricky figuring out what you want is?

power, in sufficiently large quantities, means constantly being surrounded by people who are trying to do whatever it is that you want, whether or not you know what it is that you want in the first place.

it’s the reason powerful people’s “gut feelings” are so effective from their perspective. like, if you have people around you who do whatever you want, you don’t need to understand what they do or why they do it or what you actually want, you just need to keep track of your feelings and like, add up all the feelings that co-occurred with any given person and you’ll zoom in on the “most effective person” (synonymously) “most loyal person” (synonymously) “greatest toady” around.

the point being, your petty cruelties and unexamined-gut-prejudices are also things that go into your “want”.

power reveals. it digs out your worst desires and removes from you the need/ability to critically examine them.

this is only… in the loosest sense corruption. power-as-revelatory seems like a better description (to me) of this specific phenomenon.

reminder that one of the foundations of western political philosophy is the Ring of Gyges story from Plato’s Republic, where it’s all “ok c'mon, that myth where this guy got an invisibility ring and used it to cuck the king (the ultimate earthly power in an ancient’s life) by raping the queen (the ultimate female celebrity in an ancient’s life), anyone would do that, right?”

And Plato tells this reasoning where no, cause virtue or something