What Makes Powerful People Go Bad?

Brian Klaas, Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us

When powerful people use their official standing to enrich themselves at others’ expense, we frequently pretend we understand why that happened. Watching elected officials with their hands in the till, or captains of industry treating their companies as their personal piggy-banks, we may nod sagely, assuming there’s a simple explanation. We may quote Lord Acton’s bromide: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” But is that really sufficient?

Dr. Brian Klaas, a UK-based American political scientist, salts his exegesis of official corruption with copious real-world headlines. Though he’s oblique in addressing today’s highly visible personalities, there’s little doubt he found inspiration in watching recent top-level corruption in American and British politics. Yet to his credit, he avoids directly addressing current personalities, or otherwise pushing hot buttons. He’d rather address root causes, than re-air the Anglophonic world’s dirty laundry.

There’s little doubt power correlates with abuse. Klaas finds evidence supporting this position, from the Spanish Inquisition to the Twentieth Century’s rogues’ gallery of military juntas, from fiddling local racketeers to the bigwigs who imploded Enron. But did power cause their corruption, or do corrupt people seek power? The answer, Klaas says, is something of both, and worse: lousy people flourish in power because we ordinary peons permit it.

Professor Klaas takes a remarkably catholic approach to understanding top-level corruption. One moment, he might cite recent laboratory discoveries in psychology, economics, or political science. The next, he interviews deposed former dictators, professional swindlers, and disgraced big-C Capitalists. There’s no shortage of evidence, from laboratories and the field, of how venal people flourish in power. But the through-line, Klaas discovers, isn’t necessarily neat or morally concise.

For instance, Klaas finds, perhaps unsurprisingly, that power attracts bad people. But bad people keep achieving power, partly, because we reward them. We unwashed masses frequently mistake superficial charm, glib language, and success in unrelated fields as markers of deserving leaders. And we’re also frequently distracted when notorious personalities collapse, failing to notice that those personalities flourished in systems that discourage good people from seeking power.

Dr. Brian Klaas

Also, Klaas finds, though bad people seek power, power also provides situations where corruption is the easy choice, and sometimes the only choice. It isn’t that power necessarily corrupts individuals, but rather, power provides more opportunities to be corrupted—and more opportunities to get caught. Power also forces leaders into situations where they must get their hands dirty, often doing things they disapprove of, because it’s the least awful choice.

Corruption might not be inevitable, Klaas writes; but it’s arguably inevitable in the systems we have currently. Whether that means multinational corporations, federated nation-states, or secretive religious edifices, our current systems encourage and reward situations that result in corruption. So yeah, apparently, power does corrupt, even if the people it corrupts might’ve been vulnerable to corruption in any situation. On first face, the prognosis looks mighty dim.

Klaas isn’t satisfied with aimless doomsaying, though. The evidence that explains why corruption seems widespread, also provides guidance for resolving corruption at its roots. Klaas distills ten “lessons” in redressing corruption, and describes not only how they might work, but how they’ve successfully worked in the outside world. These aren’t moral abstractions invented from cloth; Klaas describes how governments, corporations, and other institutions have resolved corruption in the real world.

What’s more, Klaas writes his discoveries, and his lessons, in a conversational, easily readable voice. Don’t let Klaas’ political science bona fides intimidate you. He turns potentially chilling situations, like an interview with a confessed murdering despot, or a conversation with America’s most successful biological terrorist, into moments of relatable human insight. Corrupt people, he discovers, are still people, as conflicted and nuanced as anybody else.

Like most circumstances in real life, corruption proves too complex for easy explanation. Power does corrupt people, but the people it corrupts were (mostly) vulnerable to corruption anyway. We ordinary people could prevent prevent corruption by changing the systems, but that requires admitting we’re complicit in the current systems, which are themselves corrupt. Every time Klaas appears headed for a concise explanation, reality intervenes, making things complicated again.

Yet Klaas leads us to recognize that we aren’t powerless. Changing the systems that encourage corruption won’t be easy, but it’s certainly possible. Not only can companies and governments prevent corruption, but many have done so, in ways that could carry across situations and apply universally. The system, and the venality it encourages, looks monolithic. But straightforward, nonpartisan tools exist to fix that monolith, if we use them.