All 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 certainty of corruption by full authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.Insert obligatory anti-formalist, left-libertarian promotion here.
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
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I've heard it before, but it sums up so much:
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3 comments:
I agree on the outcome, but I disagree somewhat on the mechanism. I'd also count a large factor of Moldbug's take on it: power attracts the corrupt.
LA,
It's hard to argue against the proposition that power attracts those who'd like to use it. However, what we know about human psychology pretty strongly suggests that that is not even close to the whole deal. Fundamentally, people act how they can get away with acting. If you have no consequences for acting badly...you act worse. And it's not a little bit worse. It's cheat on average by $2 (more than otherwise) out of $10 available on a self-graded unverified test, on the first instance of trying it. Circumstance is huge in driving human behavior, and power may be/is the biggest of the circumstantial drivers.
I don't like the self-graded-test experiment.
If I find myself in some sort of psychological experiment where I am given a set of "rules" and there are obvious methods of gaming or breaking those rules so as to get some extra pocket money.
Then...
It seems to me that I am actually in a larger game where breaking the obvious rules is really part of the game. Like bluffing in poker, it's not really cheating, because in the actual game as played, bluffing is part and parcel of the meta-rules.
Stick me in the psych experiment and I'll try to game the system to get the extra dollars. Give me a charity chocolate box with a honour system for dropping coins in the payment jar, and I wouldn't dream of ripping off a couple of dollars.
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