I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say power does corrupt. For almost all of history, any sort of power eventually comes with corruption. Its kinda the human condition. That being said, I do think there are ways of minimizing that corruption and defending against it.
I would recommend looking into Robert Caro’s work. He’s quite literally the world’s leading journalist on curruption and power. His book The Power Broker in particular is a really good exploration of this in the real world . He’s famously quoted as arguing that power has no influence on curruption, other than that it simply reveals existing curruption in individuals. In particular his arguments hinge on the idea that when you can finally do anything you want, you do
I guess I’d agree. I’m just quite pessimistic and view that almost all people are quite corrupted and checks and balances of a sort reign it in.
It’s easy to over generalize but I think it’s important that we focus on developing systems that account for power enabling currupt individuald. We’ve seen attempts at this throughout history. It doesn’t mean those attempts have failed but rather that curruption (and it source) evolves just as much as anything. Currupt people will always find their way into places of power because it’s what they inherently want. It’s our job as citizens to constly come up with new ways to out smart them
