Wisdom Notes on Psychology

Corruption of Power

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Consider a male social idealist. Power becomes a way of overcoming something about society that he dislikes or hates. The existing state of society and politics causes him distress and unhappiness. The more that he hates society, the greater becomes his desire to change it, the greater becomes his desire to impose his ideas on society. When society is moulded into his ideal of perfection then he will be happy.

But even the social idealist cannot surmount an evolutionary impasse. Since the social idealist is usually in advance of the existing level of social development, so the mass of society can never live up to his ideals. Dis-illusionment brings more sorrow and diverts him into a course away from social idealism into that of individual idealism, or else gives rise to a tendency towards paranoia (if his hatred of society increases).

I consider that there are levels to idealism, by which I mean that there is an ascending scale of intensity of practice (in terms of living one’s ideals). Such levels can be arranged into a progressive list, based on progressive levels of character development. For me, the list begins with being a moralist and progressing to being reformist, and onwards to being revolutionary, New Age spiritualist, libertarian socialist (or anarchist), and finally to existentialist. The difficulty with any idealism is that happiness can never be a stable product if the idealism has a strong influence of hatred in it. 

I see the goal beyond existentialism to be that of synthesising together the binary poles of social and individual idealism.

Abuse of Power

Many people can use power in beneficial ways. However, I am interested in the ways in which power is abused. A person’s use of social, religious and/or political power usually reveals the limitations of that person. The limitations reflect the moral boundaries of the person – narrow and bigoted boundaries often indicate little ability to handle power for the common good.

One limitation is the belief that there is one law for those who have power and another for those without it: the person with power respects only those who also have power. This gives rise to a common failing. When a person has power, that power is abused when it is directed into areas of society where any person has psychological problems. For the person who has some form of political or social power, then when dealing with any sector of society of which he disapproves (for example, drunks, prostitutes, beggars, hippies), he will abuse his power in his interaction with these sectors. Authoritarian morality produces abuse in the sectors of society which are considered to be immoral or hateful or inferior.

Why does this abuse occur?  I consider a man’s difficulty. Abuse occurs because the person’s psychological problems undermine his moral principles and corrupt his exercise of power. Power is neutral but the person is not. Power magnifies both the virtues and the vices of the person.

Within the area of his psychological problems he has a weak self-image. So power becomes the means to achieve self-validation: the person uses his power to bolster his weak self-image. The deception within this stratagem is that, instead of basing power on proven abilities, the person bases power on his vanity. The possession of power has the effect of magnifying the intensity of his vanity. This way of using power as a means of validating himself signifies that he cannot use power wisely in situations that he finds unpleasant. Unpleasant relationships that are manageable when he has no power become unmanageable when eventually he does have power.

If the person were wise enough to restrict the exercise of power to areas of relationships in which his virtues shone then power would present no problem – he would have no need to rely on power to give himself psychological support.

Paranoia

Sometimes a person has to exercise power within the area of his psychological problems; for example, suppose that he has an ambivalent attitude to a higher authority. The higher authority may be an actual one, or just peer pressure. Now he may tread the path to paranoia.

An example of a paranoid response to peer pressure is Lenin’s attitude to socialist intellectuals during his years of exile, before he became supreme head of the Soviet Union. In 1903 at the second congress of Russian socialists he was accused by his socialist rivals of always searching for enemies in the socialist parties and seeking to unmask fellow socialists. This was not an isolated incident. Throughout his life Lenin was obsessed with attacking and splitting any socialist movement not controlled by himself.

Paranoia arises from a deep sense of mistrust in other people; the person becomes enveloped in suspicion and is impelled to reject any form of social or political control. He ceases to be influenced by peer pressure. The suspicion is caused by fear, and the rejection of external control reflects the vanity mode of pride.

The emotions that drive paranoia are:
Paranoia = pride (mode of vanity) + fear.

Paranoia is likely to arise when a person is in control of some organisation but is subject to an external group or external forces with yet more power. Consider politics: politicians are vulnerable to mild paranoia since they are always prone to public criticism and ridicule – they may fear the power of their critics. But more obvious paranoia may become visible in European politicians who feel threatened that the national government will lose authority to the European Union – it seems to me that this was sometimes the case with British Conservative politicians, from Margaret Thatcher onwards.

For an historical example, I give my views on Hitler. From 1935 to the German invasion of Russia in 1941, Hitler was flexible and successful in his opportunist power politics. Fortune was with him. But once the German army began to be defeated in Russia, his belief in his own invincibility was shaken. His political adaptability disappeared. Now his politics became rigid and inflexible and the army was forbidden to retreat under any circumstances. It became impossible for Hitler to remain the successful and flexible political gambler and risk-taker that he once was. Rigidity and inflexibility are hallmarks of paranoia: the person attempts to maintain an inflexible will in order to mask his deep fear. In effect, rigidity in one’s beliefs becomes a means for stabilising the vagaries of normal will power. Once Hitler realised that he was no longer in control of the battle situation, then he sank into severe paranoia, no longer trusting even his best generals.

As a side note on Hitler, in the last year or two of his reign, he aged very rapidly. The emotion that causes fast premature ageing is bitterness. So in his final years, he was engulfed in bitterness and paranoia.

Paranoia flows into religious ideology as well. If a person has a background of authoritarian religion, then its dictates will be embedded in his conscience. If he experiences a change of belief and begins to reject that religion then he may well go through a phase of paranoia towards that religion until he has managed to exorcise those dictates.

Effects of Abreaction

There is another factor involved in the corruption of power. I use Lenin as an example again. During his youth he seemed to have a pleasant personality; then his father died. A new facet to Lenin’s character emerged. His sister noted the harshness that now appeared in him: he did not have to fear his father anymore [¹]. The same effect occurred in 1917 when he became the supreme head of the Soviet Union. Since there was no longer anyone in authority over him, so fear was removed and its binary – anger and aggression – came out into the open. His habitual hatred of the bourgeoisie increased to the point of having them subjected to unwarranted violence and death, in order to intimidate them. He revamped and revitalised the secret police for this purpose.

By considering Lenin’s propensity to violence I extended my analysis of corruption. The immediate ascension of Lenin to supreme power brought the euphoria of catharsis. Then under the twin pressures of the civil war and dis-illusionment with the peasantry so abreactive resentment and bitterness set in. It was this resentment and bitterness that crescendoed his hatred of the bourgeoisie to the point of terrorising them just for the pleasure of doing so. Hence the way that Lenin interpreted his experiences of abreaction had a major influence on early Soviet history [²].

As a comparison to Lenin, consider Palmerston in the 19th century. He had a strong self-image. In his use of power as British Foreign Secretary, during the height of Britain’s political ascendancy over much of the world, there was no corruption. In his several accessions to political power and dismissals from that power he was dispassionate and unruffled. No paranoia, no catharsis, and no abreactive resentment. Hence we can see that it is not power that corrupts as such, but that power reveals the latent corruption within the person.

Three Factors

My final formula for the corruption of power is that it has three factors. The ways in which power is mis-used will depend on the relative intensities of these factors.

Here “abreactive hatred” denotes the stage of resentment, which may or may not be followed eventually by the stage of bitterness.

Corruption of power, in varying degrees, occurs in peacetime Western situations. In British politics the coming to power of the opposition party, if Britain is riding on the crest of an economic wave, generates a social catharsis. When the economic situation subsequently deflates and collapses (even if it takes a few years to do so), abreactive hate is generated. The deflection of this hate into an issue such as the European Union is usually a familiar tactic. Otherwise, a well-trodden alternative is that the poorer sections of the community are deliberately penalised. In the latter case, retrenchment of government spending (on the poor) is proclaimed to be a virtue.
Government during social abreaction is usually poor government.

[¹]. Lenin’s state of mind at the death of his father is described in  Lenin’s Childhood, by Isaac Deutscher, Oxford UP 1970. [1]

[²]. I have six articles on Abreaction on the Home page. [2]

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