Six Principles for Understanding the Power Game
Over the course of this pandemic, there has been a tendency to overlook the temptations associated with positions of power, or treat people in those positions as if they were immune to the perennial hunger for power that has driven politics, war and conflict throughout human history.
Like children desperate for a father figure to tell us how to manage our lives, many of us have treated a wide range of authority figures as though their intelligence, benevolence and commitment to the common good were incorruptible, or as if they were so resistant to the temptations of narcissism, pride, and will-to-power, that there was something unseemly about uncovering potential errors in their judgment or conflicts of interest that might corrupt the impartiality of their decisions.
Examples abound. Consider the fact that a large number, and sometimes a substantial majority of citizens, were in favour of severe restrictions on their movements and livelihoods. They had embraced the logic of lockdowns, simply because that is what their governments and public health gurus had told them was an appropriate response to the virus.
Or consider how quickly citizens embraced the destruction of informed consent, in the shape of vaccine passport systems and steep penalties applied to those who refused government-recommended Covid vaccines.
Consider how quiet journalists were about the lack of full disclosure by the vaccine industry of the information they had gathered on adverse effects. It was as if nobody dared to depict multi-billion-dollar vaccine companies as guilty of misbehaviour or susceptible to corruption. This is rather extraordinary, given the fact that Pfizer has the dubious honour of having made the largest out-of-court settlement ever for healthcare fraud.
It is important to understand that no office, however noble or public-spirited, is immune to the alluring charms of pride, narcissism, and power. Human beings, while often motivated to help others, are also very often fascinated by the prospect of exerting power over others, and winning the respect and admiration of their peers. The love of power and prestige can and does corrupt people’s love of the common good and concern for the well-being of their fellow human beings.
This is true of professional thieves and mafia gangsters. But it is also true of government ministers, social media companies, and Big Pharma CEOs and employees.
Although we cannot live our lives second-guessing the decisions of every authority that exercises power over us, neither should we lapse back into an unreflective, child-like trust; otherwise, we regress to an infantile state of blind submission to authority, and run a serious risk of surrendering our rational autonomy to unscrupulous actors.
We must be ever alive to the possibility that those occupying positions of social or political authority may fall in love with their own power, and start to wield it in destructive and unjust ways. We must remain critical and lucid about the temptations to which power-holders are exposed, and be prepared to resist unjust exercises of power by all legitimate and peaceful means we can. Otherwise, blind submission to authority could send our society down a very dark path indeed, as the history of totalitarian regimes amply demonstrates.