Power
Absolute power and all that
It seems strange that certain kinds of people want so much power over other people.
But if you find it strange, you probably associate ‘power over people’ with ‘responsibility to anyone you have power over.’
I think the people who want power usually want it because they don’t think about it this way. Which is strange to an ordinary moral person. Why wouldn’t you think ‘I better do a particularly good job being of benefit given how many people I affect.’
A main reason the powerful don’t often think like this is that many believe they are special and their elevated status and influence is due to them. They tend to positively appraise whatever it is they do, and so the heaviness of the power they exercise doesn’t weigh them down like it would some of us. What they do is good because they do it.
Even so, this is a strange way to think. How special could you be? Why couldn’t someone else do what you do? Why wouldn’t you view the various alternative things you could do and worry about screwing everyone else up?
It seems like this would be the obvious way to go about it. If I exercise power over you, I am affecting the trajectory of your life, I am impacting you, so I would be responsible for that. The more power, the more responsibility.
When Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben tells him ‘with great power comes great responsibility’ he isn't thinking of ‘the exercise of power’ but ‘the potential to exercise power.’
This amounts merely to the usual moral obligation we have to alleviate suffering but amplified by the fact that Peter Parker has extra powers so he could do a lot more. He could ignore that, if he wanted, and then he wouldn’t be exercising power. But what he can do can’t be done by anyone else so the burden is greater on him, according to how he interprets the statement.
Whatever he does though, does bring a greater burden, which is why it is risky to use your power.
One of our long-term problems is that the morally better people tend to avoid power-seeking. There are probably many reasons for this but certainly one is that the exercise of power is going to involve many moral compromises and good people tend to want to avoid situations where they might be corrupted or forced to act contrary to their moral values.
I cannot tell if this is cultural or not, if it is our system and the way that it rewards a certain kind of competitive behavior, creates a culture where people are impressed by meaningless or harmful displays of dominance, and where people sort themselves socially in ways that steers people with firm moral values out of the running for top positions.
It might seem a little paradoxical that this is due to the faux egalitarianism in our system, where there is no fixed class of people who are known to be groomed for power. So we can’t even intervene within that class very well. (Not that such classes were ever very good. They were often dipshits of the highest level because their rank was guaranteed and not at all dependent on any personal gifts. However, they were a visible target for moral intervention if someone ever wanted to intervene, which they rarely did.)
And our system is not egalitarian. Certain accidents of birth still push dipshits upwards, and hold others back with greater potential for wisdom.
Even if people could overcome the corrupting influences, which perhaps almost nobody can.
The solution would depend on a system where the people themselves have power, so any power that is exercised over them would be very limited. We were supposed to have that. Remember?