Power Tends to Corrupt

This is a rather general post. You can read it as a commentary on Donald Trump’s behavior, and that might work. But my point is broader.

I won’t surprise anybody with this quote from Lord Acton from a letter he wrote to Bishop Creighton in 1887:

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The remark has become so popular that it is often used more as slogan and sounds a little trite. However, I think it contains a deep insight that I would like to explore. Lord Acton was not the first. There were others before him who had expressed a similar idea and also in similar terms. The observation is general, and cannot have escaped anyone who has thought about the subject. Lord Acton only brought it into a particularly pithy form.

The context for the quote is political, so this is about political power. And the term “absolute power” here refers to the power of an absolutist monarch or someone in a similar position. However, you can also understand it more broadly, and that’s what I would suggest because Lord Acton’s insight has more mileage. Although the last part is the punchline, the first part seems more relevant to me, so I will concentrate on it.

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Power is the ability to make things happen, or its realization. It could be power over things, but the important point here is power over people. Everybody has power over themselves, apart from some exceptions like mental illness that I will disregard here. Power over other people is not a given. Some have it, others don’t.

If you have power over someone else, you can make them do what you want. In a way, they are then like things to you or like puppets where you pull the strings. Such power does not have to be exercised, it could only be latent as a potential. But then if you say that someone has power over someone else, it is usually the observation that the potential is realized, or else it could be hard to spot.

Power may not be in all regards, but could be limited. You can direct other people’s behavior in one sense, not in another. For example, an employer can direct you to some extent while at work, but not otherwise. It is hence not inconceivable that people could even have power reciprocally, but for different domains. However, mostly it is unidirectional: One person has power over another.

This puts certain constraints on how power can be organized on a social level. If some people have power over many others, there can only be few of them with a large amount of power, many are on the receiving end. Those can still have power over other people, which leads to a hierarchy, and the larger power of those above them may be indirect and run through them. Not all power has to be organized in a larger structure, though. There can also be power that is only between two people or within a small group.

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What can confer power on someone?

There are many possibilities here: It could be an inner inclination to submit for no reason and as a matter of principle. It could be that one person has something that others want to have access to and then they are willing to trade some control over their behavior away. What they are after can be many things: Money, wealth, connections, social validation, beauty, attractiveness, excitement, fame, and so forth. Some power also comes with social roles: status in a society or more specifically in an existing hierarchy. That could be in a business, in a religion or in a government.

Power can furthermore be temporary and limited. But it can also be without bounds, or something in between. It can be by without escape, by force or also sometimes through a psychological hold one person has over another. It may arise from a situation. Or power can be given to someone by choice and in a consensual and voluntary way.

You can hold different views on whether power is moral or what type of power is. But that is a different question. Some people challenge all power, others only certain types, eg. power founded on force or power that is arbitrary or by specific persons. And there are many more positions. However, I use the term only in a descriptive sense here that does not imply a moral judgment.

The crucial point of power over people is that someone has the ability to direct the behavior of others and pull the strings so to say.

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The second word to interpret in the quote is the verb “to corrupt.” It has a broader and a narrower meaning. In the narrower sense it stands for things like bribery, embezzlement or buying a politician off. I don’t know whether Lord Acton had that also in mind, but my impression is that it was not his thrust, or at least not in the first place.

The narrower meaning seems to have become more popular, though, over time. So, it is a little hard to avoid it, and it intrudes into our understanding of Lord Acton’s quote. This is even worse in German, where “korrumpieren” is by now almost only used in the narrower sense. It is hence necessary to fight this narrower interpretation back and focus on a broader sense of the word.

The word itself stems from the Latin verb “corrumpere,” which is the combination of “cum” (with) and “rumpere” (to break into pieces). That’s where the German word directly comes from whereas the English word went through Old French and is actually the past participle “corruptus,” not the verb, but still became one.

The original meaning in Latin seems to have been something like “to break down.” But it already took on a wider meaning early on. The point was not that something was actually breaking down or had already, but only that it became prone to do so. That would then mean that something gets hollowed out, it rots away to an extent where a structure becomes weak and brittle. I would say that that is the broader meaning of “to corrupt” that Lord Acton has in mind.

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Now, I would say that there are at least two interpretations of what gets hollowed out so that it becomes fragile or even falls apart: intellectual and moral corruption. Let me explore how this can result from having power, not only in a political sense, but also in others.

Intellectual Corruption

There are different conceptions of what truth is. One that I would subscribe to is that it is objective. It is something beyond what humans can change. An opposing view is that truth is purely subjective: Truth is what you think it is. And there is a position in between, but closer to the subjective version, namely that truth is what people agree upon as the truth, which could be called intersubjetive. It then still depends on what the reference point is: Is it everybody and has there to be a complete consensus? Or can it be also for smaller groups only, which leads to a sliding scale to a purely subjective conception.

What can also be confusing is that what someone or a group of people subjectively set as true is itself something that is objectively true. You can build many fallacies on equating the two: It can be true that everybody in a society agrees that there witches exist or the world is flat. But at the same time, it can still be objectively false. The two assertions are distinct.

The three ways of thinking about truth do not have to diverge. For example, it is often not unreasonable to assume that what everybody believes to be true is perhaps so for the reason that it is objectively true. That may be correct, but it can also be wrong as the examples about the existence of witches shows or the ubiquitous belief in earlier times that the earth is flat. Likewise, your personal idea of what it true must not diverge from that of the people in your society. Often it will not, but then this is not necessary either.

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Objective truth is somewhat scary. You don’t have power of it. No matter what you do or what you want, it cannot be changed. Subjective truth is much more comforting here, it gives you a sense of being in control. If you believe hard enough, you can change what is true. Bringing more people on board may leverage your sense that you are able to change the truth. It is no longer you with maybe a rather transparent motive to engage in what could be wishful thinking.

If many people believe what you want to believe, then this may feel like you can also force objective truth. It looks like that is behind it. However, here is the bad news in my view: It doesn’t work. If there is objective truth, it might work out also as intersubjective truth. But that does not imply the other direction where you basically scrap the concept of objective truth.

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Now, how does power figure into this?

In a way, there was already one hint: Insisting on subjective or intersubjective truth versus objective truth gives you power, even if it is perhaps illusory. If it does not change things, it at least feels better than being faced with a reality you have to take as it comes.

As for your own subjective truth, it is easy to set: Just decide that something is supposed to be true if you want it so. However, if you go against what other people think, and you are not clinically delusional, there may be a lingering doubt that you might just be wrong. Ideally, you would hence try to get others to agree with your subjective truth and thus create the consensus that looks like underlying objective truth.

If you have power over other people you can do this to some extent. You can simply demand that they agree with you. But it does not have to be so crude. If those other people want something from you, they might find it convenient to take the active role here and flatter you with their agreement. There are also other ways: If you have power, you can simply remove those people from consideration that do not agree with you and surround yourself with those who do. Again, that does not have to be on purpose, it might just work out this way because other people cooperate with your plan of their own accord. This can then reinforce itself if they take the consensus as a sign that something objectively true must behind the intersubjective truth.

Someone who has a lot of power over other people and maybe even many people can be quite successful along these lines. They can think up what is true, then induce others to follow suit, and produce a consensus that it is the truth. This creates a feeling of great power in the truth-setter. They can really do it, and so maybe this also carries over to objective truth. What more power could you wish for?

It certainly depends on your character. Some people will just want to know the objective truth regardless and understand that it cannot be produced in this way. They grasp that just because you have a consensus, this does not bring objective truth about. And if it exists and has to be taken into account, misleading yourself and others will have consequences. You may begin to act on something that is objectively false, and objective truth will get you in the end.

However, there are also people of another character who are intrigued by the prospect of setting the truth, which is, as noted, a comforting idea and confers a feeling on you of great power over the world, If someone like this has power over other people, the temptation can be irresistible to try it out. However, this comes at the price that you may now set yourself on a course against objective truth. It still feels good.

Actually, there is a strange phenomenon that you can often observe in such situations. Those who are in a position to set the truth, appear to be dubious about whether it can work. They then begin to experiment and pick “truths” that to any outside observer come across as complete lies. If it works out with those who are under their power, they are perhaps satisfied that they really have the power to determine what has to be true no matter what.

The more power someone has and the more they are inclined in this direction, the more they will shape their environment accordingly. You will find the flatterers and yesmen around them. They will experiment with how to produce intersubjective truth, and the less resistance there is, the farther they go. Over the longer run, this can lead to a rather delusional worldview the more you try to go against objective truth.

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I have heard this story that I have not checked, but assume is true although I am not sure. During World War II, Winston Churchill had the idea that you could get to France via Spain. But there are mountains, the Pyrenees, between the two countries that make this hard. Churchill had the power to demand from his generals to work a plan out, and they did. However, he did not have absolute power and was probably also interested in the objective truth. The British generals then explained to Churchill why his plan was a stupid idea. If I have this right, he was even told that he should not waste their time with such nonsense again. And so the plan was abandoned, which was probably a pretty good outcome.

Compare this to Hitler. Early on during World War II, he was willing to listen to his generals, but he also often overruled them. Some things worked because he was more of a gambler and lucked out. However, this meant that over the course of the war, he began to disregard advice more and more. He also surrounded himself with lackeys that did not have the spine to contradict the Führer.

They were perhaps not personally threatened, but would have suffered demotion, enough for them to play along. The whole system was geared towards concentrating absolute power in the hands of one man. The result was that in the final phase of World War II, Hitler did his own thing. In his bunker, he would plan attack by shifting tokens on a map that were supposed to represent military units. Everybody else knew the units did not exist. But Hitler did not get the feedback, and if so, he would have used his absolute power to shut it down. He could create intersubjective truth around him by his power, but he could not change the objective truth in this way. It cannot work.

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But then I don’t have to invoke Godwin’s law this early. Everybody knows this mechanism also on a lower level. Take hierarchies in a company. My experience is that for those on the lower rungs, objective truth is so in their face that they have to deal with it. But with each step upwards, this sense dissipates. It can easily happen that top management is completely deluded about what is happening in their firm.

It is not that they necessarily want it to be so, they may even have an interest in staying close to objective truth, but it gets harder the more power they have. All the mechanisms kick in: Lickspittles, opportunists, schemers surround them who are only too willing to egg them on into believing in the “intersubjective truth can force objective truth” ploy. And then people with the respective weakness often rise in such hierarchies because they can create a sense that they can pull it off that impresses others.

Not to overdo it: This is a tendency, not everybody falls for this or to the same degree. It also depends on the whole corporate culture. The more authoritarian it is, the less willingness there is to face criticisms, the easier it is that the mechanism plays out. It can hollow a sense of objective truth out and lead to complete delusion. Any larger organization is plagued by this to some extent.

I immediately have to think of concrete people here, smart people to be sure, who behaved in ways that were objectively laughable, but could not understand it anymore. But then this can also happen in smaller groups: a family business, a terrorist group or a cult. The more hermetic an organization, the easier the corruption. Openness is a challenge because it means objective truth can intrude. That’s why one of the effects, but also of the causes, often is a certain bunker mentality.

I would call this the intellecutal corruption that power tends to produce. It is a hollowing out of a sense that there is an objective truth that you have to face as it is. Instead it is the attempt to set your own truth against it and create an intersubjective truth or a semblance thereof that looks like it stems from the real thing: objective truth. If the discrepancy is moderate, it can work. If it becomes stark, you will sooner or later run into problems. First it rots and hollows out, then it may collapse.

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Moral Corruption

The case on the moral side is similar. You can have a view that moral judgments are objective and cannot be changed. Or you can set your own standard of what is supposed to be good and bad. And then there can also be the position that what people agree on determines moral judgments. I would here also fall on the side of objective morals. Again, these conceptions do not have to diverge, but then logically they do not have to coincide either.

When these views come together with power, a similar dynamic can unfold, again depending on the persons and their characters involved and their environment. This time it is not about what is true and false, but about what is good and bad. The person in power — and more easily the more power they have — experiments with setting the morals and how to get a consensus. They are then very eager to make others play along and confirm the goodness of all this and of their judgment. And you can also have a similar phenomenon as above how they experiment with moral judgments that to outside observers are patently immoral, just to see how far they can get.

All in all, this leads to what I would call moral corruption that power tends to engender. A hollowing out of moral standards and even of a sense that there are any that cannot be changed. You can find many examples of this throughout history, but also on every level of organization from the largest to the smallest. Since the underlying process is so similar, it is small wonder that both intellectual and moral corruption frequently go together. The concrete people that came to my mind for the former were also into the latter.

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In principle, you can have this process also for other such standards, eg. in aesthetics: what is beautiful and what is not. Here objective standards are perhaps least defensible. Beauty is, as the saying goes, in the eye of the beholder. Still, it is notable that those with a lot of power and the respective inclination to use it, have also a penchant for monstruous art or even more so architecture. It is the outward demonstration of the power they think they have, or perhaps rather wish they had.

The German anarchist Rudolf Rocker (no kidding, that is not a pseudonym, but his real name) makes a persuasive argument in his book “Nationalism and Culture,” namely that power and culture are inimical. He uses the word “culture” here in a very broad sense that would also include questions of truth and morals, not only the aesthetic side.

One of his examples is the contrast between Ancient Greek and Roman culture. While the Greeks had comparably little use for power, for the Romans it was central. And indeed almost everything that is great in the ancient world and has stood the test of time came from the Greeks. The Romans added little to it. What they did was mostly derivative and at best they leveraged what they had learned from the Greeks with their power. With the Greeks, there was also one exception: the Spartans who were also into power. Nothing of value ever came of that either.

Rudolf Rocker published his book in 1937, but had been working on it for a long time. He had to leave Germany when the Nazis took over and instituted their cult of power. Rocker eventually landed in the US. And what interested him before all was the long-term development that had led to the Nazis.

His main contention is that German culture was great when there was no Germany and little power to go around, and that it declined in parallel as society became infested with power worship. While I think this is a little crude — there were also some great contributions later on — on the whole I would say that Rudolf Rocker gets this right. Power sucked the culture out.

I don’t agree with many of Rocker’s political views, but I like the spirit that drives him forward. And especially the second volume of “Nationalism and Culture” contains many deep observations about what had gone wrong in Germany. What I find also interesting is that Rocker, who had started out on the extreme Left that was extremely hostile to Liberalism, discovered it later in life and developed an appreciation especially for the American tradition of liberty.

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To sum my point up: Power tempts those with the respective character to replacing objective truth and objective morals with what they personally set as truth and morals. This opportunity perhaps attracts such people in the first place and helps them rise.

There are various mechanisms how this works out: Mainly those in charge try to validate their subjective views by a consensus that is produced through their power and which has a semblance of one that stems from objective truth or morals. This creates the illusion that you can turn the direction around and gain power over objective truth and morals in this way.

It is not a hard and fast connection, but a tendency that can be observed in many situations. And the result is a hollowing out of objective truth and objective morals and even the rejection in principle of their very existence. Or more pithily and in the words of Lord Acton: Power tends to corrupt.