All power corrupts...

Joseph Stalin (Mr Steel), 1879-1953

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."

This famous quotation was made by John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, first Baron Acton (1834–1902). Lord Acton, historian and moralist, expressed this opinion in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887. 

There are many so-called 'great men' whose picture would sit neatly here but I've chosen Joe Stalin, one of the most notorious dictators in the twentieth century, a century that could almost be defined as the century of great dictators. In the same club belong Franco, Hitler, Mussolini,  Mao Zedong, Joseph Tito, Pinochet, Saddam Hussein, Qaddafi, Castro, Pol Pot, Kim Jung-Il. Ferdinand Marcos, Suharto, Hosni Mubarak, Lukashenko, Khamenei, Robert Mugabe.... The list might be much longer and of course it is not only dictators who are corrupted by power. That stain extends all the way down the line to headmasters, scoutmasters and the men who put clamps on cars.


But is it necessarily the case that if you had unlimited power you would start to do whatever you wanted regardless of how other people might be affected or wronged? Well, there is a strong empirical case for this view as the list of dictators given above would seem to suggest. Maybe you wouldn't behave like that, but then you do not have absolute power over others. What would do if you had a magic ring like that of Gyges? 


There are, I think, at least two different sorts of people here. The first group is the one we probably all belong to if we come close to having the chance. There are a lot of people who in big ways and small will as we say 'stop at nothing' to get what they want. The men who cheat, deceive, politick and gamble to get on in their careers. They are the men - they're usually men -  that Philip Larkin mentions in his poem Toads, the ones who go out and get 'the girl and the fame and the money'. The ambition of these captains of industry and the like can scarcely be held in check. They frequently break the law, but they get away with it. In a world without laws and without the threat of exposure, prosecution and punishment, things might be a great deal worse than they are. 


There is another sort of person who doesn't just want the good things in life like the men in the first group. No, these people want raw power, power to directly control the lives of others. They are, like Muammar Qaddafi and Robert Mugabe, unmistakably bad people. There does seem to be a strong empirical case for thinking - as Plato suggested through the mouth of Glaucon in the Republic - that it is only fear than makes people behave and stops them from behaving like wolves towards their fellow citizens. 


What does hold us back from behaving like these people? Is it simply the lack of opportunity? Or the lack of courage? Are we just gutless wimps? We are in practice held in check by the fear of discovery and punishment. The policeman on the street and the High Court judges investigating fraud stop our imaginations from taking control of our lives. But there is also the internal policeman, the father figure, the stern teacher and the priest who coalesce in our minds as the voice of conscience, telling us not to do that, to wash your hands and not to play with those rough boys. This is what Sigmund Freud called the superego, a kind of social control mechanism that we have made our very own - our conscience. This makes it look as if it's just external threat and internal conscience that keep us in line as 'good' law-abiding citizens - and if that is true then Glaucon is right: there is nothing that keeps us from behaving like pirates of the Caribbean. All that Stalin or Mao has to do is to make us afraid, very afraid, and then their own power will be unassailable. Commentators reporting the Arab Spring have said many times that what makes these uprisings a 'spring' is that the people lost their fear of the dictators.


Unchecked desires for sex or property or power can lead to horrible situations for the people who lose out or suffer as a result of these predatory activities. We cannot rely on the individuals concerned - which is probably all of us at some time to some extent - having an 'Achilles' moment': that moment when he recognized his common humanity with Priam and the dead Hector. Few people experience anything like that and it's noticeable that Achilles was himself the one hero at Troy who came closest to doubting the system of heroic values by which he and the others lived. Plato, centuries after Homer, claimed that people whose lives were dominated by material desires for wealth and the like were unfit for political power. He feared the kind of state that this would produce. Plato also drew attention to the smaller number of people whose lives were driven by a desire for political power. These were the people who produced tyrannies and military dictatorships. The big problem for Plato was how to keep these two destabilizing forces from dominating the state. In modern terms, how do you keep  the worst aspects of consumerism and political tyranny out of the state?

Don't be misled by pictures - it's complicated!

Plato sketched out a sort of map of the human soul, one that whatever its shortcomings, has been enormously influential. Human beings have three distinguishable parts or aspects that make up their conscious sensuous lives. The most obvious aspect covers all those bodily desires whose satisfaction gives pleasure. Another type of impulse that put us into competition with others, all those things that make us touchy and quick to pick an argument. These are the desires that produce the old military temperament with its sense of honour that demands duels and blood. Unchecked they produce the bullies, mafia bosses, Rockefellers and tyrants like Robert Mugabe and Muammar Qaddafi. The third aspect of our human existence is what is broadly called 'reason'. It is this alone which has the capacity to assess, check and make judgments about these more basic impulses. In Plato's vision of things, reason must exercise the controlling and examining role in the individual and in the state.


So what should poor Gyges have done? In Herodotus' version of the story Caudaules, the king, treats Gyges as his favourite and telling him time and again how beautiful the queen is, until the king finally persuades Gyges against his own better judgement to watch the queen undressing as she goes to bed. (See the picture in the previous post!) The queen's honour compromised, she insists that Gyges kills the king and take the throne. In Plato's version, Gyges is led by a simple greed for the power to satisfy all his wishes. As so often in life, one unchecked desire leads to another. Well, Gyges might have paid more attention to the doubts of his own conscience and ideally he should have stopped and thought the whole thing through, but foresight like that is in short supply. Plato believes that if you yourself don't have these rational abilities - that practical capacity for judgement and restraint - then there should be political mechanisms in the state to keep our desires and ambitions under rational control. That's where his philosopher rulers come in, though few of us today would want to be governed by a Committee of Public Safety that put Hegel, Rousseau, Karl Marx and Wittgenstein in charge of our lives. (Wittgenstein couldn't teach primary kids without losing his temper like a mad man!) On the other hand, Plato was right to draw attention to this - the rational management of desire - as the most fundamental problem in human life.