Power and its Endorsement by the Masses

Thinkers begin with assumptions about human nature, and then proceed to rationalize behaviors and suggest improvements to order and efficiency based on those assumptions. I'm no different.

When it comes to my assumptions about human nature, I believe that power corrupts. Or at least, power leads to an increased tendency to take up the added opportunities and benefits associated with it. Where there's suddenly the opportunity to exploit, why wouldn't people take it up? We can't rely solely on the goodwill of human beings to do good and avoid being corrupt. I don't blame the powerful from taking advantage of their power. Why shouldn't they? In fact, considering one's payoffs (or capacity to get away with something) seems more predictive of one's behavior. It is naive to hope that those in power know the "right" thing to do. Even more so when the morality of our actions is a subjective matter, open to interpretation and debate.

The corollary to this assumption is that rather than devote time and effort to encourage those in power to behave, it is the masses who should be empowered. Power is a social construct and thus doesn't exist in a vacuum - it is nothing without the endorsement of followers and subservients. Thus, instead, I would hold responsibility of power abuse-prevention to the empowerment of followers, both potential and existing. Teach them to think for themselves and ask just one more question. Remove their ignorance. When the masses are critical, leaders cannot take advantage of their ignorance. That is a safer bet to the prevention of abuse of power than educating leaders on how they should behave and hoping that they will.

A Cold, Hard (and Amoral) Look at Leadership

When properly looked at, natural leadership occurs when a dominant person acts in his/her own self-interest and, in the process, enables followers to benefit from his/her self-serving behaviour. In ancestral times, as a silly and simple but relevant example, perhaps it was a man who knew where the watering hole was, and wanted to get there anyway. Followers who were less competent in finding it could help him carry his goods while he led them there. This natural process selects for competent, capable leaders who could articulate to followers how, by being subservient and giving up some autonomy and self-interest, they could gain something from his capabilities. Leadership and followership evolved because it was an efficient process that eventually led to a net advantage for whole groups over the course of social history, both human and animal.

Servant leadership is the idea that leaders should want first and foremost to serve followers and are held accountable by the people the leader governs, in pure altruistic fashion. Like many other modern good-to-haves, servant leadership is unlikely to have emerged simply from rational thought alone - its formulation was forged from a drastic need to deal with the fact that the influential ability of leaders meant that leaders could also get away with many dastardly things. The evolution of leadership wouldn't be complete without a counter from followers, who adapted by evolving emotions that made them upset, angry, cheated and disgusted when leaders become corrupt. Servant leadership is a socially constructed dynamic that actively suppresses the tendency of leaders to put their own interests ahead of their followers' interests.

But just as much as we have those emotions acting as alarms to warn us against being too unfairly taken advantage of, people far and wide still see confidence, dominance, assertiveness and aggression as virtues in leaders. When we can potentially see these traits as attractive in a leader, we allow him or her to get away with doing whatever it takes to "get shit done." A tasteful mix of these characteristics in a person makes him or her charismatic, and we often forgive charismatic people for taking a little more than their fair share of the pie.

Because at heart, the propeling force of leadership is self-interest. Lots of it. A person wouldn't last as a leader without it, and simply bestowing a fancy title on anybody doesn't make the person a sustainable leader. This is the reason why a student studying politics doesn't necessarily become a politician after that; governors, CEOs, directors, pastors and generals are a self-selecting lot and, for better or worse, their immense, self-aggrandising belief in the value of their own ideas, goals and needs over others' persistently drives their rise to the top.