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.
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?