“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.” -Lord Acton, 1887
The whole letter is worth a read. On judging historical figures: “The chronological plea [that they lived a long time ago] may have some little value ... It does not allow of our saying that such a man did not know right from wrong”
history.hanover.edu/courses/exce...
"A man is hanged not because he can or cannot prove his claim to virtues, but because it can be proved that he has committed a particular crime."
"There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. That is the point at which . . . the end learns to justify the means."
"It is not that power corrupts, but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to be come drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted"
- Frank Herbert
(great Acton quote, btw)
I’m Herbert Fan #1 but I’m not sure I’d take anything he said about society as gospel. Dude thought we had generations of individual memory stored in our DNA and shit (or at least thought it was plausible enough to make it a major plot point)
Yes. I think it corrupts. Any level of fame or success, you can feel it. None of us would be doing much better with Musk’s level of power and wealth and that’s why we really shouldn’t give that amount of power and wealth to any one person. We learned this already re: kings.
Frank & Beverly Herbert (she wrote most of the epigrams the chapters began with) had a gift for crystallizing centuries of political experience into pithy aphorisms.
There's probably some truth to it, those less likely to be corrupted are also less likely to to seek power, but anyone surrounded by yes men and insulated from the consequences of their decisions is going to go bad
Neither point is absolutely accurate. Both make valid points on the dichotomy of power. I would also add that being sociopathic and charismatic makes it much easier to attain and hold power, particularly of the absolute sort.
It is not a single-cause outcome. Tim Berners-Lee voluntarily gave up a lot of power he could have exploited. Quite a lot of scientists have, and still do, gift their work to the world rather than milk it for profit. People are a whole lot more complex to study than most of us would like.
"All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible."
-- Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune
(I think Lord Acton is generally correct, but there's an element of this too)
I think my favorite thing about that letter is that it's best summarized as "Stop excusing bad behavior because 'that's just how it was back then'"...from someone in the 1880s.
Sometimes I feel like history is nothing but echoes.
An example on power and corruption: Police say, with justification, we need police, because if people are not held accountable some end up doing horrible acts. And American police, who are rarely held accountable, prove the point.
I've done some soul searching, and I think I know the power threshold where I'd begin confusing "good" with "the greater good," and then "the greater good" with "good for me."
That said, it's probably much lower than I think.
"Just this one time I will make an exception for the good" becomes "well I can make an exception here too" becomes "this isn't an exception it is my right" becomes "I should not be constrained"
So you’re saying I should be waiting for Craig Newmark to stop quietly doing good and worthwhile things with his money and instead become a milkshake duck??
But that wasn't the thesis of that paper. He was talking about the canonicity of saints and who in the church decides who was worthy of a position and who was not.
It was also written 20some years after the civil war.
Dude was just a nobleman that didn't want anybody telling him what to do.
All of what you said can be true and yet Acton's statement can also have transcended the specifics of its saying and now be so widely quoted because it speaks to a deep truth about the human condition
Having lived through Boris Johnson as U.K. Prime Minister, I have to hold him up as someone who was always a corrupt . I mean, his teachers wrote about it in his school reports.
Yes but... I think that the "locks don't prevent serious criminals, they just keep honest people honest" theory comes into play here. People are imperfect, and temptation is a thing. Power removes the checks on temptation. And getting away with it makes it more likely in the future.
I'm saying that power itself is not what causes corruption and evil, it's that some people (a lot of people) are drawn towards positions of power because they were already corrupt.
And I'm saying that (almost) everyone is more or less corrupt to start. And societal checks on corruption prevent it from expanding, but power reduces or eliminates those checks.
Yes, that may make it more attractive to those who start more corrupt, but it's still a corrupting influence.
Yup. This concept came up recently when my daughter told me she felt conflicted about the sexism of her distrust of men. I told her I don't think it's a gender thing; it's a power thing. Our culture gives most men inherent power from the start. But a woman in power might also do harm.
I feel like a lot of that is just propaganda tho. Like, what little we know (as in, isn't just swill) about the DPRK is that the chairman position is largely theatrical. China and the USSR were (and are, in regards to current China) very democratic, with the "leader" being head of a committee.
I should also point out, that while democratic, those critical of Putin tend to die, and in unseen circumstances.
Boris Nemtsov
Anna Politkovskaya
Alexander Litvinenko
Sergei Magnitsky
Boris Berezovsky
Natalia Estemirova
Stanislav Markelov
Anastasia Baburova
Mikhail Lesin
While I agree that Russian elections do happen, and they appear democratic, there is a long history of election fraud, tampering and transparency, that makes the US elections issue seem like a childs play.
RF =/= USSR.
The USSR government was basically formed of multiple circles stacked on top of each other, with one person in each circle being the elected face and leader. So Stalin was just the team leader of the team leaders, basically. CIA themselves said as much after he died.
The CIA documents analyzed after Stalin's death emphasized the highly centralized nature of Soviet power under Stalin. He was not merely a "team leader of the team leaders" but rather the supreme leader who exercised substantial personal control over the Communist Party and the Soviet state
The CIA docs literally said that Stalin was not, in fact, a dictator, and that their propaganda network worked extremely well. Perhaps too we'll, as they had seen the Cold War potentially heating up on the horizon.
False. The USSR was not "multiple circles stacked on top of each other" with one person in each circle being the elected face and leader. Instead, it was a highly centralized system dominated by the Communist Party, particularly through the Politburo, headed by Stalin (and his need for Power).
