Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Lord Acton said it and we, as common men and women, would do well to keep one eye constantly on the truth of it. Anyone, man or woman, who pursues power and authority will pander without limit to the one who bestows it, be it voter, king, or collaborator. The pandering goes hand-in-hand with an abandonment of principles – social, moral, economic – because principles, being above and outside the individual, will not serve his or her aims on power.
Principles must therefore be sacrificed, and the resulting hypocrisy, with all its vanity and vices, is a partner to power. But, once power is won, the underlings must be deceived into a belief that the bearer of power is benign, true, and noble; in this way, power is strengthened and maintained, and corruption thereby operates with a free hand. So, highly refined hypocrisy is vital to this state of affairs, because only through constant and facile deception can natural truth be suppressed to control the populace through propaganda, influence-peddling, fear-mongering, and demagoguery – in other words, corruption.
A second truth in understanding the abuse of power is that emotion is the driver of all action. Intellect and reason are only research facilities through which possible choices may be analyzed, parsed, and, perhaps, prioritized. But intellect is never the prime mover in action. The process of analysis and rationale do not move someone from one state of play to the next. It is always emotion. Enthusiasm for a choice’s benefits, fear of negative outcomes, greed for advancement, disgust, revulsion, nurture, security, and more – the emotional state brought on, however slowly or immediately, by one or more of these factors is what moves the foot or the hand or the mind to take the action.
Therefore, it is not possible to overestimate the emotional state of the constituency as the pivotal means of acquisition and control of power. In an obvious instance, this is how the media exercise, marshal, and strengthen their power, and how they fail constantly in their public mission by allowing the hypocrisy of the profit motive to supplant the higher principles of journalism and free public access to the truth. Corruption in the media tends to be in direct proportion to the profit power obtained in manipulating public emotion by distorting the truth. But the media are only one obvious abuser of power. Greater malfeasance and greater harm are visited on us by mendacious public officials, and the higher the position, the greater the leverage for corruption.
Thirdly, manipulation of beliefs is a wide path to power. Nothing defines the interface between intellect and emotion more forcefully than beliefs. Beliefs are primarily emotional phenomena. They bridge the gap between a partial understanding of something and the full knowledge of it. Beliefs substitute for knowledge until—if ever—the real thing comes along. For instance, if we suspect someone of a crime, but we have no reliable evidence, we may believe the person committed the deed, but we can’t know it. Of course, firm knowledge, knowledge that will stand up under intellectual rigor and the tests of time, cannot be obtained in many aspects of life. Great risks come to bear, however, when belief masquerades as knowledge, when a belief and the circumstances that surround it are so convincing to the believers that they no longer hold back for the knowledge, but allow their beliefs and the emotions fundamental to them to drive their actions. The “rule of law,” as an example, recognizes this basic tendency of humans and their beliefs, and therefore sets down standards beyond which we may not stray in pursuit of social and criminal justice.
But corrupt power not only does not proclaim it when belief supersedes knowledge, it actually encourages the triumph of belief over knowledge, because belief can be controlled through emotion, and vice versa, whereas knowledge based in fact, reason, and intellect is less easily distorted by power’s influence and for power’s gains. But manipulation of emotions by giving false or inflated credence to beliefs is a primary way in which those in power attempt to dictate outcomes in political, economic, and societal events and issues.
