Power Corrupts and Blinds

Everybody knows that power corrupts.  It's become cliché.  But it also blinds - how else can the powerful proclaim that although power corrupts, they, themselves, have not been corrupted.  With power comes the sense that one is so powerful that one is incorruptible.  It's so easy to criticize others, and so difficult to recognize one's own fault, even when one looks.

I knew a man who had a position of power and actually verbalized his own understanding of the "power corrupts" cliché as meaning that his power corrupted the way that other people saw him.  That is, that people just didn't understand what he was doing or why he was doing it.  That his actions and intentions were pure, but the fact that he was doing them with power backing him, meant that people misperceived him.  Of course, in reality, he was corrupted and blinded to his corruption, for really that is the corruption - one always thinks that what one is doing is "right" or "justified" or at the very least "not wrong".  Otherwise, one wouldn't do it - human beings generally don't go out of their way to consciously do evil, or at least psychologically protect themselves by convincing themselves that they aren't evil, or that the ends justify the means.

The other day I met a lobbyist who refused to admit, despite persistent questions from an otherwise sympathetic audience, that lobbying was at minimum problematic; that there was something anti-democratic about people with lots of money hiring other people because of their contacts to use those contacts to push legislation.  I've met other lobbyists who at least admitted that it sucked but that it was the way the system worked.  This one, though, kept defending her job because she was promoting "good" legislation - her power had corrupted her and blinded her to the fact that she had an inordinate amount of power compared to, say, the average citizen, because of her contacts.

I know that in my own case I have used the power of being a teacher expeditiously, rather than cautiously, sometimes frankly, coercively.  I'm not particularly proud of this fact, more like disappointed in myself.  One can only try, I suppose, but one needs to at least acknowledge the fact that it's a difficult path and that occasionally one strays.