Power and the Nature of Power

[Prince of Spires]

ontains within it the implication that there is an absolute right and wrong from which someone can drift. That gets argued over at once. Indeed, there are arguments that holding to a set notion of right and wrong is itself a wrong. Or a necessary right.

I'm not completely sure that's the case though. I'm not religeous at all. But humanity has certain behavioral traits which are considered good and bad. Yes, some (or even most) of these might be cultural. But across the world and across societies and cultures you tend to run into group behavior which is considered good.

But maybe it's better and more clear to talk about shifting or changing behavior under the influence of power (without the good/bad qualification attached to it). Then you can point out a shift from working for the good of society to more selfishness in the person.

I think there are certainly cases where power corrupts in that sense. The interesting question might be if it always does so. After all, we only read about the cases where power corrupted and was abused. You'll rarely see a newspaper article claiming someone had completely normal behavior for the past 20 years. Or about the government official who simply did his job well. It's always about the people who stepped out of line.

 

[Mad Swede]

And that's where things get interesting. A statement like "...someone's sense of right and wrong shifts over time..." contains within it the implication that there is an absolute right and wrong from which someone can drift. That gets argued over at once. Indeed, there are arguments that holding to a set notion of right and wrong is itself a wrong. Or a necessary right.

Yes, there are such arguments. They were tried by several Nazis as part of their defence at the Nuremberg Trials, the arguent being that not only did they have a different set of values and standards, but that these values and standards meant that the Allies had neither the right nor the authority to hold them to account. The court didn't buy the argument.

You could have that sort of standpoint as part of a fantasy setting, and there are hints of it in Joe Abercrombie's books. I think its difficult to make characters who espouse such arguments sympathetic, in part because some of what they do will seem so wrong to most readers. More than that, you risk being criticised for making such behaviours seem acceptable or even desirable.

One of the many places where fantasy could do good work is to use fantastical settings and peoples to explore these notions of corruption and ... what would you have for an antonym? Virtue? Honesty? Whatever you wish.

Anyway it would be easy to give, say, dwarves a different value system. The end always justifies the means. And the means must always justify the end. The two are a dialectic, says dwarvish philosophy. Now figure out social and legal relations from that.

The antonym you use would depend on the viewpoint of the character concerned. To use your example, a dwarf would see such behaviour as normal, acceptable, even desirable. But a human or elf might not. And the impact on social relations might be severe, to the point where there is an almost constant conflict between different groups and cultures. Then you might really be talking about a grimdark setting.

It's the sort of thing that is very difficult to pull off in "realist" fiction because that's not how our world works. But in fantasy the palette is richer.

There are quite a few very serious authors who explore this, e.g. Chinua Achebe, Ephraim Kishon, James Ellroy, Mary Renault and
Paolo Bacigalupi. Several of them have been criticised for making certain unacceptable (by modern standards) behaviours seem heroic, which illustrates the difficulty or, perhaps more accurately, the likely controversy in dealing with issues like this.

 

[FifthView]

I'm a little late to this party, so apologies if I'm throwing a wrench into the works.

The older I get, the more my views on this have altered—well, altered until they're almost set in stone. In other words, through various stages of my life, I would have answered the question differently. Probably. (I always question my ability to see myself clearly, and that includes seeing past versions of myself.)

One idea that has hovered with me and now is set in stone, more or less, is the idea that people are fundamentally selfish. That's a loaded word, however. Let's say instead that people are primarily interested in what concerns their own welfare, happiness, safety, desires, aspirations, and so forth. This is not to say that people do not care about others' welfare, safety, desires, aspirations, and so forth, but only that the concerns of others are almost always filtered through the lens of concerns for oneself.

This view may seem a little harsh. You might even say it's too jaded, too cynical. But I think it's true. Caring for others may be genuine! But! The positive outcomes for others make us, who view them and know them and care for them, happy, or in some cases give us a sense of security, or....whatever.

Even if I should find myself in a position to sacrifice my own life for another, my desire that they should live is still my desire. Their survival, or the thought of it at least, makes me happy. Depending on the person who lives, my happiness might take on various forms. My feelings about it might be quite complex. Why am I happy that my own loved relatives will survive me? Why would I be happy that some stranger I've never met before will survive me? Why would I be happy that a heretofore unmet police officer, or kindergarten teacher, or young pastor will survive me? It is almost too complex a topic for me to break down the exact why in each of these situations; the why is different, subtly, in each. Nonetheless, it would be my desire that they should live although I will not.

All of this is a long way of telling my answer to the question in this thread. Power, to the degree that it facilitates satisfying desires, will be used for just that, satisfying desires.

This is what makes the topic so complex. Who can define a desire exactly? Who can define the source of a desire, the root cause of that desire? Because these questions are rhetorical here...I'll say they are necessarily rhetorical. We, the members of our species, are very inept when handling these questions, inept when handling the very idea of desire.

Because we have evolved as a social species—one so weak that an individual is hard-pressed to survive entirely on her own—we are forced to deal daily with others whose desires are even more difficult to discern and understand than our own personal desires. We may have evolved to benefit from social structures, to overcome individual weakness in the wild, but these very social structures have placed us side-by-side with others who will use whatever powers they possess to satisfy their own desires.

In other words, all our neighbors are both, potentially our benefactors and potentially our enemies. Potentially. That word right there embodies the concept of power—in its etymology. Because of this dual nature potential in our neighbors and the indeterminacy of discerning the nature of their desires, we've developed elaborate methods of directing and even curbing the expression of personal power within our society.

This is a topic too large and complex, and too dear to my heart, to be addressed adequately here, but suffice to say that concepts of corruption have more to do with these social norms that have built up over the lifetime of our species. (Yes, altering also through the history of our species.) Corruption might be viewed through a religious lens, a political lens, a cultural lens, or a personal lens, but regardless it is merely a deviation away from a norm that is intended to protect people from other people. Your desire, fulfilled, might prevent me from fulfilling my desire. Since your desire requires some measure of personal power in order to be fulfilled, I must therefore curb your personal power if doing so is the only way to ensure that my desire may be fulfilled. Or, vice versa.

An increase in personal power on one side of any equation threatens an other side's ability to achieve personal desires. We can only say "threatens" in this hypothetical because we don't know the desires of the two sides, heh. An increase in personal power for you may not at all threaten my ability to fulfill my own desires. Heck, it might improve my own chances. Thus, politics is born. It's messy because, even if you and I benefit from your increased power, there may well exist another individual or a group of others who lose in that equation.

So we invent phrases like "Absolute power corrupts absolutely." That's a silly phrase.

For one, no human power is absolute; far, far, far, far from it.

For another, there will always be imbalances, people will be differently powered, at least for the foreseeable future, and so there will always be an ability to spot "corruption," depending on who is looking for it. If there is always corruption of this sort in society, it's..."absolute" already? Dunno.

It's a silly phrase.

The TLDR; version, for answer to the thread, is that both are likely to happen. Whoever gains power will, without doubt, attempt to use it to satisfy personal desires—at least, insofar as the power in question can be seen as a potential facilitator—and so we might say power reveals something about the person possessing it. This revelation may indeed make a person seem to be "other" than once seen. Will this alteration appear to be a corruption of that person, for those viewing the change? Quite possibly. Especially if their own path to satisfying their own desires is now blocked in some way, they are likely to point a finger and say, "Corrupt!"

 

[FifthView]

Some additional thoughts, since we tend to focus on the fantasy genre.

• In fantasy, is it true that "no human power is absolute?" Why, yes, in almost all stories. In fact, this seems to be a necessity for about 99.9999% of stories. But I guess there's a possibility of playing around with an authentically all-powerful, "absolutely powerful" being. (Question aside re: whether the character, if putatively a human, would in fact still be human at that point.)

• I quibbled in my phrasing with "insofar as the power in question can be seen as a potential facilitator."

1. Imagine a fantasy character has the magical ability to turn one tree leaf from green to blue, once a day. That's it; that's her power. Is this likely to corrupt her—define corruption however you like? It does not seem, from my vantage, that such a power will facilitate the satisfaction of any desire.* Of course, if we're talking about a Hollywood movie, seeing her use this ability in the first 10 minutes will mean it becomes crucial to satisfying some later desire; so, who knows? (If this is a CW teen drama, she'll eventually turn into that world's equivalent of Satan, at least for a time...heh.)
   
2. I also wonder if ignorance of the potential of a power might limit chances of becoming—or being seen or thought to become—"corrupt." A character with the power to turn one tree leaf blue, once a day, might not even consider how to use this ability to benefit herself. (But is this the sort of thing we mean by power, or is it merely an odd ability?)

*Edit: And I, after minutes of reflection, have already begun to think of scenarios in which the one tree leaf from green to blue per day would be pivotal to a fantasy story. So it is possible for us to make it consequential in a fantasy story. But my general point remains that the word "power" itself can be somewhat squishy in general discussion.​

 

[Devor]

So, this post got a little mellow.....

~~
I think... about the corrupting influence of power, we tend to simplify things, and we forget that people are many things all at once.

It's been a while since I've used this analogy, but I have a pair of gray slacks. Only, when I look at it closely, there's no actual gray. It's a series of white threads tightly interwoven with black ones, but you'd have to look very closely to notice. Likewise, people aren't all one thing to be corrupted. People have skills, passions, and baggage.

So I think it's not about finding people who are all good and thrusting power into their hands. It's about finding people whose passions lie in making good use of this power, whatever it might be, and whose baggage is elsewhere.

But you know what sucks about the real world? You start off with lots of passion, and only childhood baggage. And then over time, your passion dwindles down, and your baggage builds up. You do the right thing, and people complain, and they fight you over it, or they agree and agree and agree and quietly watch it blow up in your face.

That's the factor, I think, which corrupts. Experience. Burnout. Disillusionment. All the things that happen on your rise up the ladder, until you find that by the time you've gathered the power you used to be passionate about, you've a got a bit of bitterness built up on the side. Empower the person, empower the baggage.

And that's the thing. How do you avoid picking up baggage? How do you let go of the baggage you do have before it sabotages you? How do you identify people who can be relied on to do that?

..........and I wonder if that question is why we tell stories about people who have, or at least should have, more than the normal baggage, from the get go. We tell stories about the superhero who let his uncle get murdered, or the hobbit who never wanted to adventure, or the famous kid wizard who was neglected in the cupboard under the stairs. Our main characters, our most popular heroes, should all be deeply bitter. But they aren't. They're heroes.

And I think, maybe that's the real super power, the one we all deeply want: The power to turn our baggage back into passion. Just imagine what you could do with that.