In a legendary conversation, Scott Fitzgerald concluded his exposition to H. L. Mencken of the special qualities of the very rich with: "the rich are different; they are not like us." Mencken replied: "that's true; they have money."
Is power like what Mencken took riches to be, something external to personality, or is it an attribute which transforms the whole character of those who have it? The argument made here is that the possession of power changes people, and for the worse.
The meanings assigned to "power" and "corruption" will emerge in the discussion. Four ways in which power affects the nature of its possessor, in which it corrupts, are briefly set forth in the first section, below. The rest of the paper is about a fifth way.
- The thought that lies behind Michel's famous Political Parties, behind his phrase "he who says organization says oligarchy," is that there is a structural element in all human groupings which inevitably makes for cognitive differences between those who lead and those who merely belong to an organization. No matter what the size or purpose of the association, those who spend much time in the ordinary daily decision making, housekeeping, and the formulation of policy alternatives, acquire an awareness of complexities, ambiguities, necessities -of the sort inseparable from practical human life -which they cannot communicate to the more marginally involved membership. With the best will imaginable toward the principles of democratic decision-making, the aims of the organization and the good of the members, leaders find it impossible to take the less experienced members through the educative dialectical process which formed their own judgments. However reluctantly or unconsciously, they find it necessary to manipulate opinion, to keep secrets, to doctor the truth. Everyone who has held office knows this to be true, and if he thinks it to be trivially true, then either his office has been very trivial or, what is more likely, he has not chosen to examine what in fact he has been doing. All leaders must lie or dissimulate. * Editor's Note: In view of the need for open discussion of the problems of our day, we wish to publish, from time to time, frank and responsible articles on controversial public issues, in addition to papers offering a more scholarly treatment of concepts and principles. The above article is another in such a series.