Meditation on power

This is something I wrote up this morning, thinking along the lines of the dictum attributed to Lord Acton: Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Bertrand de Jouvenel des Ursins has written more about how we find this illustrated in history, specifically the history of France from the fall of the Roman empire to the twentieth century. The need for renunciation is a theme in all serious philosophy since antiquity, though it is often ignored in modern conversations about power, which either take the accumulation of more power for granted, as necessary, or embrace it explicitly as good. To me this looks like suicide. 

People can wield power well, at the individual level. But the persistent problem in our history is systemic: the existence of hegemony that persists in human societies too big to operate without strangers. When someone in the family goes criminal, we deal with him; when strangers go criminal, they take over (or we become them to keep them from taking over, effectively yielding the same result in terms of exposure to ruin). Driving a large society, policing it against internal crime and protecting it from external invasion, will always yield dangerous power: impersonal, insoluble by individual moral agency. Recognition of this fact should temper our desire to grow empires: there is a natural limit somewhere, beyond which all power gained is actually bad, no matter who or what possesses it.

We have to know how to relinquish as well as how to grasp, if we are going to survive.

         ante diem XII Kalendas Iunias, anno Domini MMXX                                                         --JGM.