Give me the Death Note, I can be trusted to act rationally. The only “undeserving” to end up on it would be people who step through Metro doors and immediately stop, even though there’s people behind them.
More seriously I know the author has said it’s about power corrupting, but if that’s the story he wanted to tell then he should’ve chosen a different protagonist. Its also a silly mantra, we do not live in a Tolkien novel, power isn’t some supernatural force.
We’ve been asking this question for thousands of years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_of_Gyges
Yes, power corrupts — in a measurable way that resembles brain damage. https://www.sciencefocus.com/wellbeing/powerful-mindset-psychology-2
Power is a social relationship. We are, more than anything, social animals. Social relationships are probably the most impactful driver of our behavior.
Sorry I referenced a widely known piece of fiction instead of the epic of Gilgamesh or something.
Secondly: Your pop-science article does not seem to show that the abstract notion of power is some magical all-encompassing force, rather it makes vague gestures towards how current hierarchical structures in capitalist society either appeal to “bad people” or rewards the behavior of “the worst people”.
There’s no causal link between the concept of power and people “becoming worse”, because of course there wouldnt be. A kindergarten teacher has immense power over her students, am I to believe due to some magical particle she becomes “evil” some day? No.
Those studies really put the cart before the horse.
People don’t lie and steal because they became powerful, they became powerful because they’re really good at lying and stealing.
That’s a rather flawed conclusion to draw from the evidence - nothing in it excludes power being gained through preexisting corruption, and considering the context of the dominant economic system actively rewarding the exploitation of others it seems incredibly naive to think power inherently corrupts. Do you really think Musk, Trump, or Zuckerberg used to be fundamentally decent people and only went off the rails once they gained power?
I don’t think anyone is 100% good or 100% bad, or that a single factor in isolation reliably flips them from 100% good to 100% evil, no.
I just think outcomes are more sufficiently explained by looking at material conditions and systems larger than one individual’s actions or immutable characteristics determined at birth.
(In fact, I kinda thought the whole “systems and material conditions vs. individuals and immutable traits” thing was basically the philosophical origins of communism vs. fascism in a nutshell.)
The problem with the conclusion that “power corrupts” is that it’s next to impossible to tease out a casual relationship. Yes, we can see that power and lack of empathy are correlated, but none of the experiments noted in the article you posted can definitively say whether that’s because 1) power makes people lose empathy or 2) unempathetic people are more likely to accrue power.
There’s also a contextual factor to consider. Many socialists have argued that capitalism incentivizes unempathetic behavior, and that it is possible to build a system where empathy is selected for rather than selected against. This is also impossible to prove definitively, but if true then it would be the case that the particular lack of empathy we see in many powerful people is specific to our own society, and not to humanity in general.