Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT 4116-4120 (October 21st-25th, 2019)
oddtail:
--- Quote from: Ariaspinner on 27 Oct 2019, 08:34 ---And "Power Corrupts" IS the correct phrase. Anyone who has seen Petty Dictator Syndrome can tell you that.
--- End quote ---
I'm aware that the phrase exists, I just fundamentally disagree with it. And "Power doesn't corrupt, power reveals" is a sentiment coming from Robert Caro, who in turn was commenting on Lyndon B. Johnson.
I don't believe in power corrupting. People in power always, ALWAYS have the chance to do things that they would face harsh consequences for if they had less power. If you choose to believe they were somehow amazing (or at least decent) people before they came into power and somehow their personalities got rewritten just because they could do more, it's your prerogative. But if we dig into earlier lives of powerful people who did horrible things, you nearly always see warning signs that hindsight helps identify, of behaviour that was either ignored or well-hidden. So, to me, it stands to reason that they were simply unable or unwilling to act on their worst impulses openly.
"Petty Dictator Syndrome" - I'm not sure if this refers to anything specific, Google is no help. If it's simply a generic statement on how dictators act - I mean... uhh, yeah. People who are upstanding and moral and exercise restraint and forethought do not usually clamor to BECOME dictators. I think correlation reveals a causal relation in the opposite direction than you're implying. It's not that being a dictator makes you petty, it's that it's a certain kind of people who become dictators.
Ariaspinner:
Sorry, Petty Dictator Syndrome is my own made up term... I do that. Using the Google the correct term is Petty Tyrant. Sorry.
But no I don't get what you're saying at all. Watch what happens when a regular worker gets promoted to boss. Now instead of having to get approval or consensus to change anything they can just demand change. And then punish anyone who doesn't like it. It happens so often it's scary. THAT is corruption not revelation.
Case:
--- Quote from: Ariaspinner on 27 Oct 2019, 09:30 ---But no I don't get what you're saying at all.
--- End quote ---
https://www.thecut.com/2016/11/how-power-reveals-personality.html
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/give-and-take/201304/yes-power-corrupts-power-also-reveals
https://www.businessinsider.com/wharton-professor-organizational-psychologist-adam-grant-what-leaders-get-wrong-with-promotions-exit-interviews-power-moves-2019-1?IR=T
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/01/magazine/robert-caro-working-memoir.html
...
--- Quote from: Ariaspinner on 27 Oct 2019, 09:30 ---Watch what happens when a regular worker gets promoted to boss. Now instead of having to get approval or consensus to change anything they can just demand change. And then punish anyone who doesn't like it. It happens so often it's scary. THAT is corruption not revelation.
--- End quote ---
Nope, that is fiction. Moreover, it is fiction about behaviour, not about the character that animates that behaviour. And most importantly, it is fiction that would fit both theories - of character corrupted by power or revealed by it. I don't see anything here that'd be relevant to-, or helpful with deciding which theory fits reality better.
Flourishing Old Occam's shaving implement rather than wielding it, so to speak ... :laugh:
oddtail:
--- Quote from: Ariaspinner on 27 Oct 2019, 09:30 ---But no I don't get what you're saying at all. Watch what happens when a regular worker gets promoted to boss. Now instead of having to get approval or consensus to change anything they can just demand change.
--- End quote ---
But it doesn't invalidate my point. They can do stuff now that they couldn't before. The notion that they became worse people is, to me, completely unsubstantiated. They act in a way they *couldn't* act before, as far as I'm concerned, not in the way they didn't *want to* before.
If I give someone a knife and they stab me, my conclusion won't be "that person didn't ever want to stab anyone, and holding a knife makes a person want to stab people!". My conclusion will be "that person always wanted a knife to stab someone, and now they got it". If you substitute any real power for "knife", it works the same. There's PLENTY of people who wield power in many forms and don't use it in horrible ways. And there's plenty of people who don't wield power and are still petty, cruel and dangerous in small ways. You know why they are only bad in small ways? Because they haven't had the *opportunity* to be bad in large ways.
Why does it matter? Because it removes the responsibility from powerful people to do good. People just accept that that's the way of the world. Well, it isn't. People who want to do bad things often CRAVE power, and often end up in positions of power as a result. That absolutely happens. But I have seen no compelling evidence that having more power leads people to be more cruel, less responsible or otherwise bad. If anything, I've seen more (anecdotal) evidence that when people are handed responsibility, that motivates them to step up to the task.
"This person was promoted to boss and acted badly, look what being a boss made them become" is backwards reasoning to me. "Power corrupts" implicitly removes agency, culpability and reasonable discourse about the limits of the use of power. And that's just no good as far as I'm concerned. Handing bad people power and shrugging "eh, it was bound to happen" is deliberate obfuscation engineered by immoral people in power so that the rest of us don't pay attention.
It builds the narrative that anyone would act this way, so we might as well keep on, business as usual. It's also way for people who want to misuse the little power they have to feel better about themselves. It's just human nature, right?
No, I don't think so. "Power corrupts" is just the same message as "look what you made me do!" shouted by every abuser in the history of the planet, repackaged to sound smarter. The fact that we have the notion of "bad boss" shows that there's nothing inherently bad about being a boss. Sure, people who end up *becoming* bosses may be bad people, because they may have more drive, ambition and be more ruthless. But again, if those people climb up more easily, it just shows that corrupted and corruptible people crave power. NOT that power corrupts them. Those who climbed to the top no matter the cost were, pretty much by definition, pretty bad already when they started their climb.
I can honestly think of only one powerful person that I would call unequivocally corrupted by too much power, and that's Maximilien Robespierre. For most historical and modern figures to hold power of any sort, digging a little into a person's biography is a pretty decent predictor of what they would do later in life, from a greater height.
Imagine a person who worked as a lawyer and was a community organiser and who graduated magna cum laude from Harvard. Now imagine, if you will, an enterpreneur of inherited wealth, with questionable financial sense and a history of screwing his business partners. Now - purely hypothetically, of course - is it possible to make some educated guesses what those two very different people might do when being handed considerable power? In the form of, I don't know, the presidency of a major Western nation?
Ariaspinner:
Ok Case the best of those articles is that opinion piece by Dr Grant. So I will focus on that.
He says power corrupts AND reveals. That takers hide their taker qualities until they get power and that the corruption reveals their hidden dark side. But that hasn't been my experience. People always show whether they are givers or takers, having power or not. Manipulators are great at hiding the truth but only manipulators. So for many promoted people nothing is being revealed. Their co-workers know exactly what horrors are about to happen once the taker gets promoted. So what changes? Power corrupts their already selfish behavior into that of a Petty Tyrant.
---==+==---
Ok Oddtail I understand you now.
You see it as an excuse. I see it as an explanation. In my eyes power corrupts doesn't exonerate anyone. It just explains the crime. Just because power has a corrupting influence doesn't mean it isn't wrong to become corrupt. Power offers an easy path to getting what you want by forcing others. Not everyone takes the path but most do. Even good people take the easy path and become corrupt ("for the greater good" they tell themselves) but they are just as criminal as the selfish one who took it knowing it was wrong and not caring.
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