How Power Corrupts
Episode Stats
Summary
In this episode of the Art of Manliness podcast, Brett McKay sits down with political scientist and author Brian Klass to discuss why people who possess the so-called dark triad of traits are more likely to seek positions of power, how the framing around those positions can either amplify or alter the self-selection effect, and what a tyrannical homeowners association president and a psychopathic school janitor show us about these dynamics.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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By way of an answer, you probably think of that famous quote from Lord Acton,
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power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
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But my guest today, Brian Klass, would say that's only one part of what leads to corrupt
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The other being that people who are already corrupt are more likely to seek power in the
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Brian argues that if we ever hope to develop better systems from our national governments
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to our office hierarchies, we have to work on both prongs of this dynamic, not only preventing
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people who gain power from going bad, but encouraging good people to seek power as well.
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Brian is the author of Corruptible, Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us.
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Today on the show, he and I discuss how people who possess the so-called dark triad of traits
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are more attracted to positions of power, how the framing around those positions can either
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amplify or alter the self-selection effect, and what a tyrannical homeowners association
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president and a psychopathic school janitor show us about these dynamics.
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We also discuss why power does indeed corrupt people and can in fact change their very brain
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Brian explains the importance of accountability and keeping a system clean, and how you can
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serve in positions of power without being corrupted yourself.
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After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash power corrupts.
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So you have made a career for yourself interviewing despots, cult leaders, corrupt CEOs, torturers,
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How did that happen when you were 12, where you're like, I want to research human depravity?
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So I got interested in politics from a young age because my mom ran for the local school
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board, which I'm sure I'll talk about later on in the interview.
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But what ended up happening was I graduated from undergrad.
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I worked on a political campaign in my home state of Minnesota.
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Of course, I actually was a bartender before that in New Zealand for a little bit.
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I started trying to find my way in life and decided to study broken systems because I thought,
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you know, naively, this is more than a decade ago, I thought, oh, U.S. politics, it sort
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So I'll try to study somewhere that's totally, totally broken.
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And I went off and started doing fieldwork as part of grad school in sub-Saharan Africa,
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Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, et cetera, and found that the most interesting
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thing to do is to gravitate towards interviewing some of the worst people in the world.
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And that's what I ended up doing for the last 10 years and sort of trying to figure out what
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makes people tick in this sort of depraved world with the hopes that we can eventually
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stop them from inflicting so much harm on the world.
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And what you've done in your recent book, Corruptible, Who Gets Power and How It Changes
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After interviewing all these corrupt people, figure out this question I think people have
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is, does power corrupt us or do corrupt people gain power?
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Before we get to your findings, what do you think are some of the common ideas that people
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generally have about power and who ends up with it?
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And when did you start having a hunch that maybe some of our assumptions about power's corrupting
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Yeah, I mean, the most famous thing, and this is something that, you know, to this day when
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I talk about the fact that I'm a political scientist or that I study power, the standard
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response people say to me is, oh, yes, I know, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts,
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It's the standard thing that you sort of trot out as a witty quote when you're dealing with
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There's an entire chapter of the book that talks about why power corrupts, how it corrupts,
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how it changes our brain chemistry, our psychology, et cetera.
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But what occurred to me the more that I started to think about this was that, you know,
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we focus on the powerful and we don't focus on the people who never seek power.
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So one of the things that was immediately obvious to me when I was interviewing, you
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know, say a war criminal or a former dictator or, you know, someone who had wielded power
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in a highly unjust way is that they're not a normal cross-section of the population.
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And so what I thought was missing from this conversation is what about the people who never
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And also what's different about people who are really good at getting power?
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Because every time that we focus our attention on the sort of tip of the iceberg, the people
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who actually have power, we're ignoring a much bigger problem, which is that certain kinds
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of people are drawn to power in the first place.
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So the book is trying to sort of do this chicken or egg question, which is, you know, do corruptible
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But the real problem is that you have to accurately diagnose each situation according to actually
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what's happening because otherwise the remedy is totally different, right?
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In other words, like if an awful person gets power and hasn't been changed by the power
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itself, then there's a different solution to that problem than if power has turned them
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So even though both effects are real, figuring out which one is operating in which context
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is absolutely crucial to making the world a better place.
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So before we get to this chicken and egg problem, right?
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I think it helps to understand first why humans have a tendency to form societies where
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there's either one person or a small group of people who have power over a large group
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Going back to through human history, was this something our hunter-gatherer ancestors did?
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So the sort of standard narrative around hunter-gatherers in anthropology and evolutionary biology goes
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something like this, that for almost all of human history, we lived in small bands of around
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80 people and societies were structured in a way that was ruthlessly egalitarian.
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I say ruthlessly because the system was designed to basically cut down anyone to size who tried
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And this was made possible by the fact that we lived in small groups.
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Now, there are some wrinkles in this sort of simplistic narrative that have been emerging
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There's some evidence that there was a little bit more hierarchy than we expected in the
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But this is sort of the general idea of what most of the anthropology evidence suggests.
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And we know this from a few different forms of evidence, including the fact that like burials,
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for example, for most of human history, don't show any sort of elevated status for individuals.
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Now, since the sort of period, you know, 10 to 15,000 years ago, where a lot of this changed,
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there's a few different hypotheses about why power started to get amassed in individuals.
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And I call them the war and the peas hypothesis, war and peas.
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And the war hypothesis is basically that as conquest started to take place, it became advantageous
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So if you had more soldiers, you're going to win.
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And as it became better to have bigger societies, you started to sort of conquer other bands and
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And all of a sudden, you've got 5,000 people instead of 80, you need some sort of hierarchy.
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And it basically says, when the agricultural revolution happened, you no longer have to
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move around to get your food, you can sort of set up shop in a city.
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And that allows much larger groups of people to sort of put down roots, quite literally.
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And as a result of that, you end up with larger cities.
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And with larger cities comes inevitably the rise of hierarchy.
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But the really big point here, I think, is that the way that we experience the world
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with bosses above bosses above bosses, everything in society status driven, is extremely unusual
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And I think that's something that's worth keeping in mind because it doesn't necessarily
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And of course, when it comes to abusive power holders, it absolutely doesn't have to be this
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We can make a better system that produces better outcomes, perhaps with less hierarchy
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or perhaps just with hierarchy that functions better.
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You pointed out that there are advantages of hierarchy because it allows you to get more
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If responsibility is diffused amongst the group, you're on the issues of like freeloader problem,
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But if there's a hierarchy, you can get a lot more done.
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And the trick is, okay, if you're going to have a hierarchy, how can you organize in a way
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Yeah, I mean, there's a guy named Peter Turchin who I interviewed for the book.
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He's one of these sort of genius types, really impressive guy who wrote this book called Ultra
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And one of the quotes he had that stuck with me was he says, we're not ants.
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We don't have some pheromone system to regulate our behavior.
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So in order to organize human society, we probably eventually do need hierarchy.
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It's probably unrealistic to imagine some sort of egalitarian collective involving 192 countries
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So the more pressing question is, does hierarchy always have to come with abuse?
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And that's why I wrote this book, because I think there's a lot of ways that we can make
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seeking power something that's oriented towards service and also ending up with systems in
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which those people who do abuse their power get thrust out of power rather than promoted.
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So it's all about sort of tinkering with the system and thinking of our world as this sort
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of grand experiment where instead of being on autopilot, which I think we have been for
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quite a long time and how we sort of deal with power in society, we start to actually think
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about how would we engineer a system that's actually going to produce better leaders and
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And I don't think that conversation tends to exist.
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It goes back to your question about sort of what people's attitudes are towards power.
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I mean, the thing is, and this is something that I think like political scientists and
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business psychologists, all sorts of people should be thinking much more about is like
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pretty much everybody I talk to is unhappy with the powerful class in society.
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Like I've never really had a situation where I've talked about my research and they're
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I mean, no one says that that should be a wake-up call that we just shouldn't keep
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doing the same thing over and over and hope that it turns out better.
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And something you point out in the book, you do a good job, is that these gripes occur
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not only on the macro level, not only on the nation state level, but you see these gripes
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occur within businesses, departments in businesses, within homeowners associations, within church
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You see people griping about the people in charge.
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Yeah, I mean, this is a, it's a universal problem and it's not just, you know, even
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though my research began in rooms with, you know, former dictators and so on, and people
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who were at the highest echelons, generals in authoritarian societies and all that, what
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occurred to me in writing this was that the more I would tell people who had, you know,
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lives back home in the United States or in Britain where I live now about my experiences
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and I describe these encounters, they would say that personality that you're describing
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sounds just like the guy who was, you know, the megalomaniac sports coach or the guy who
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as, as you say, runs my homeowners association.
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And it sort of gave me a working hypothesis for the book, right?
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That there's like, there's something about power that's worth studying, not just about
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these sort of extremely high echelons that we tend to think of and that make headlines
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that actually there's a sort of syndrome around power that operates even on the small
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I mean, I, I did try to find people and I describe, you know, a psychopathic janitor in
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I said, I describe a megalomaniac homeowners association who's obsessed with palm trees being
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And the, the gravel in the area being not imported from out of state.
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I mean, we all sort of have in our mind's eye, somebody like this in our life.
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Like everybody I've talked to about with this book, when I describe my work, they always
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You know, it's, it's this person I used to have to deal with and thank God, you know,
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I never have to deal with that person again because I've just cut my losses.
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And I think, I don't think I'm, I'm not naive enough to say we can eliminate those sort of
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It's just that we can curtail how often we encounter them.
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And I think that, you know, even if we made this 20% better, the scale of human suffering
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and frustration that it would reduce would be absolutely enormous and transformative.
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So I think it's definitely worth, worth doing, even if we can only curb the problem rather
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So let's dig in more to like why it seems like just bad people end up in power.
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And the first prong of this idea is that power or positions of authority attract a certain
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So what does your research say about the type of person that's attracted to positions of
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So I think there's a, there's a few things to say here.
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First off, you know, when we describe someone who's power hungry, it's always a bad thing,
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but power hungry by definition is what you're describing when you're saying who is seeking power in
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a competitive environment, somebody who's ambitious and power hungry is more likely to throw their
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hat in the ring to apply for a job, a promotion to become a dictator.
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And I think, you know, it's, it's really easy to understand the sort of selection bias without
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I mean, you think about if you go to a high school basketball tryout, you would be completely
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baffled if the average student at that high school basketball tryout was of average medium
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There's a self-selection effect that tall kids go towards basketball and the same thing
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You have certain traits that self-select towards these positions more than others.
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One of them is obviously those people who are power hungry, but there's also what I describe
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in the book is what's called the dark triad, which is this sort of destructive chemical
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cocktail of personality traits of Machiavellianism, sort of the ends justifies the means types
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people, highly strategic thinkers, and then second, secondly, narcissists and thirdly, psychopathy
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And those three traits in common form something called the dark triad.
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And those people are obsessed with power and they're very, very good at getting it.
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So, you know, that's on the extreme end, right?
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These are the people who are disproportionately likely to seek power, get it, and then wield
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There's also just something about the systems that we inhabit that amplify the self-selection
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So, you know, when you think about those systems that involve public service and they're quite
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clearly are designed to serve the public, like if you're a librarian, you don't have people
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who are power hungry librarians because everybody knows that the job is not about sort of being
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And so the way you portray positions of power, I think is really, really important.
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And there's a section of the book I talk about this with in terms of policing that I think
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illustrates the point best of all, and it's basically looking at how recruitment for policing
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And I found some quite different examples of this internationally.
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So in the U.S., there is an ad that was put up on the Doraville, Georgia Police Department
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website, now taken down, that shows the Punisher logo first, right?
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A vigilante, a guy who basically captures criminals and then tortures them, and then shows these
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guys in military fatigues in a literal tank screaming into view.
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With death metal on screen, the sort of hatch opens, they throw out a smoke grenade, they've
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got assault weapons, and then the Punisher logo comes back on screen.
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And you sort of think, you know, like, what kind of person says that's exactly what job
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Well, I mean, you know, like militaristic people who like the idea of sort of being viewed as
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soldiers in an occupying army, not public service police officers.
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And in New Zealand, they recognized this self-selection problem and deliberately designed advertising
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Not because they didn't want people with military experience, they just figured they're going
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But because they thought, you know, we can counteract some of this self-selection by making policing
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So they designed this recruitment scheme with videos called, Do You Care Enough to Be a Cop?
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And in one set of videos, there's a hungry boy walking around a city in New Zealand with
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hidden cameras around to see who stops to help him.
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And the implication is, if you're one of the people who would stop to help this boy, you
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And lo and behold, you know, what happened was quite predictable.
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The diversity in terms of the people who applied for the police expanded dramatically.
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The relationship between the police and various communities improved significantly and levels
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It's like if you set up a system of power to appearing to be oriented towards service, people
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who are oriented towards service are going to apply for it.
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And I think, unfortunately, in a lot of the modern world, the trappings of power, the
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status symbols, the sort of fame, all these things, they put those self-selection effects
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I described earlier on steroids and make sure that the people who are power-hungry are far
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more likely to self-select into those positions of power in the first place.
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And so, you know, to me, the thing that we get wrong about power that we really have to
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think about is what I said at the beginning of this idea of just focusing on the tip of the
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If we only analyze who the powerful people are and how they behave, and we don't think about
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the people who don't end up trying to become more powerful in our societies, we're missing
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Because the problem isn't to make bad people behave better.
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It's to make good people want to seek power in the first place.
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And I think, you know, the thing that really alarms me in modern society is that becoming
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I mean, you know, think about running for political office.
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Like most people listening to this would never in a million years consider running for office
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because they're like, I don't want to destroy my life.
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I don't want to constantly have to raise money.
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I don't want to have to pretend that I believe things that I don't believe.
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And all of those things, which now have become, you know, part and parcel of being a modern
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politician, they're going to repel exactly the kind of person that we want to be a modern
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And all the people who love the power, the money, the fame, and don't really care about
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having to ask for money or pretend that they believe stuff they don't, those people are
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going to, you know, make a beeline to run for office.
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And so, you know, my big worry about this is that we've constructed a society in which
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And it goes back to what I was talking about with the school board member mom that I have.
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She used to be a school board member and she sort of inspired me to, to get
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I mean, even today, like you see videos of school board members who are getting death
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threats, who are getting their, their children sometimes get like harassed outside of schools.
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And it didn't used to happen, uh, in the 1990s when I was growing up and there was, you know,
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the sort of the big dramas in the, in the school board locally were, you know, about union
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pay disputes or, you know, some parents who's upset that evolution is being taught in school,
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So, so I think, I think we also have to think really carefully about how we can make power
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attractive to the kinds of people who currently think it would be a terrible burden that they
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Well, yeah, you can see this again on a micro level.
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I want to talk about this homeowner association guy being a homeowner association president
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Cause you're just basically, you're dealing with neighbors snipping at each other and
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like, well, this guy did this with his, his fence.
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And this guy is putting his garbage cans out at the wrong time.
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And he's got his RV out and like that's, and then you don't really get thanked for
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And so you have people who's like, I don't want to be homeowners association president.
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And so it's going to attract people with these dark triad personalities who are power hungry,
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And this happened, this homeowner association, Arizona, tell us about this guy.
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Cause it just sounds, everyone loves, loves to complain about their HOA.
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So, you know, I, I talked to a guy who I had to change all the names for, you know,
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for legal reasons in this, but I talked to this guy who went through the saga from hell
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And it's worse though, than just being thankless.
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It's actually like actively bad because you have to police your neighbors on things that
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Like when they put their trash bins out and like how they're mowing their grass and all
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this type of stuff, which attracts a certain type of control freak.
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So, so in this specific example, it's a homeowners association in Arizona, you know, reasonably
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small community, nobody really wants to do the job.
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And all of a sudden this guy just emerges out of the woodwork and is like really, really
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excited to do the job, which is like the alarm bell should be going off at this point.
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And he starts basically consolidating power, purging the homeowners association and all
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the other people are like, yeah, like we don't really want to be here anyway.
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So if you want to like replace us, that'd be great.
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But you know, unfortunately for them, the people he replaced him with were like his cronies
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who were like subservient to him, never challenging his power.
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And he started to target these individuals by name in various newsletters.
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And I've read like dozens of these newsletters that they were sent to me so I could verify
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I mean, it's, it's all these like all caps things insinuating.
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There's some like plot out to like not trim their palm fronds to sufficient code and so
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And then when, when these people start to stand up to him and say, we're going to try to
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boot you out of the HOA because you've become this power hungry tyrant, he develops all these
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new rules that begin to target them specifically, you know, going after the kinds of gravel they
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have in their yard, a rock at one point gets thrown through their window and they suspect
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And what's been interesting in writing the book is, is, you know, I, I found this, this
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story and talked to this person and thought, you know, this is quite a bizarre situation.
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It's actually the thing that I've gotten the most emails about, I would say, since the
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book came out is like these people unloading their HOA stories on me.
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And I'm like, you know, I, I, it's not like my professional job to like be an HOA chronicler.
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It's just like part of a book I wrote about power, but these people are venting because they're
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like, finally someone has captured the fact that like we have neighborhood tyrants who
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And I think this is an under scrutinized world because, um, they actually control a lot of
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I mean, the actual number of amount of assets controlled by HOAs is mind boggling.
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I think the number is something like the equivalent of the state of Florida's tax revenue.
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So you're talking about a lot of really power hungry, busybodies controlling a lot of money.
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Now, if you're, if there are any HOA presidents out there listening to this, I'm not saying
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It's more that there's a disproportionate selection effect.
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Anytime that you have a job that is actively policing people on the most trivial stuff, unpaid
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and voluntary, and the self-selection effect I think tends to go on steroids in those environments.
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And that's why I think, uh, modestly as a proposal, I might suggest if you want better people
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in HOAs, uh, you might want to pay them a little bit.
00:23:57.980
So at least you're not just getting the person who gets off on the power of policing their
00:24:03.140
We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.
00:24:09.520
Well, another trait of people who are power hungry is psychopathy.
00:24:13.880
And you saw this again, this is like a really small scale.
00:24:16.840
This is this janitor who basically became Tony Soprano in the school district.
00:24:23.720
Like how was he able to accumulate so much power in the school district?
00:24:29.100
So this guy's name is Steve Rauchy and I don't have to change his name because he's been convicted
00:24:34.480
So Steve Rauchy was someone who perhaps had modest ambitions by most people's standards.
00:24:40.820
He was a janitor at the Schenectady New York state high school, and he wanted to be a sort
00:24:47.020
of kingpin in the school district maintenance office.
00:24:50.060
So he systematically set about to achieve this through incredibly Machiavellian scheming.
00:24:56.100
One of my favorite stories, and you know, there's, I went through so many court files and so on
00:25:00.880
in researching this bit of the book is going inside the mind of a psychopath is a very odd
00:25:05.560
But one of the plots he hatched in the sort of early days of consolidating power was that
00:25:11.960
the school district wanted to save money by reducing its energy costs.
00:25:17.460
So they appointed an energy czar, so to speak, whose job was basically to reduce the school's
00:25:23.540
And this guy who's put in charge of it just sort of, you know, it's the standard story.
00:25:26.600
Like, you know, the district asks you to do this.
00:25:30.300
And you just sort of say, yeah, okay, I'll do it.
00:25:31.900
And so Steve Rauchy sort of spotted an opportunity.
00:25:35.120
He said, look, you know, I know that you don't really understand the software that's been
00:25:40.500
presented to you to like manage the school district's energy supply.
00:25:43.980
I can just sort of manage it for you and you can take the credit.
00:25:47.080
Now, this guy accepts because he's sort of overwhelmed by the sort of software and doesn't
00:25:53.800
Steve Rauchy takes control of the software and starts manipulating it.
00:25:57.260
He starts turning on the stadium lights on public holidays.
00:26:00.940
He starts increasing the amount of time that the heating is on and that the lights are
00:26:05.820
on on weekends just to try to ramp up the energy bill, basically.
00:26:11.920
The guy who was appointed energy czar is relieved of that position because the energy usage has
00:26:20.040
And so Rauchy is then made into the energy czar for the district.
00:26:23.140
And he operated like this throughout his whole time in his pursuit of power.
00:26:27.540
I mean, he became a senior official in the union and ultimately started making quite a
00:26:35.320
But he also did this weird stuff where like when people would cross him, he would make
00:26:41.180
examples of them and then make everybody else around him like observe the fact that he had
00:26:46.180
So at one point he believes that he knows someone who has whistleblown on him, that he'd
00:26:51.560
been sort of behaving like a tyrant in the district maintenance office and needed to
00:26:57.020
So all of a sudden, these people's homes the next morning has the word rat spray painted
00:27:04.960
And Rauchy, you know, doesn't admit to it, but basically forces his employees on the clock
00:27:11.160
to make a pilgrimage in school district vehicles to like observe that these people have gotten
00:27:17.520
And, you know, I mean, there's, there's also stuff about his personality where like he says
00:27:22.420
stuff in various recordings that were then turned over to the court, their wiretaps and
00:27:26.160
so on, where he, uh, he talked about, you know, I wish I could have had a Steve so that
00:27:32.120
I, you know, I wish I could have had a twin so that I could have had a Steve in my life
00:27:35.260
thinking that like, he was really sad that he didn't have himself to turn to because
00:27:41.960
Anyway, the reason he ends up in prison is because he starts going over the top with his
00:27:47.660
He places explosives on the car of a colleague.
00:27:50.240
He has explosives in his office in the school district, you know, itself and has night vision
00:27:55.620
goggles in his office as well, which is quite an unusual thing for, uh, you know, a sort
00:28:00.160
of maintenance official at a public high school to have.
00:28:02.720
The reason I use him in this story though, is because what's really interesting about psychopaths
00:28:08.640
is that Rauchy is an example of an undisciplined non-functional psychopath, which is to say
00:28:15.740
when he needed to turn down these traits, he couldn't, it was impossible for him, but
00:28:21.800
for a lot of functional psychopaths as they're called, they can turn them down at times when
00:28:27.480
And this is something where, you know, the, the sort of all the psychopath researchers I
00:28:31.400
spoke to said that superficial charm is part of the, the psychopath modus operandi and that
00:28:37.640
the functional psychopaths can switch on their empathy when they need to, they can sort of
00:28:43.080
blend in when empathy or being chameleon-like in a certain situation is advantageous.
00:28:48.740
And those people, the functional psychopaths, the point they all make is those are the people
00:28:54.800
Uh, not, not universally, obviously there's still a small percentage of the overall pool,
00:28:59.420
but the best research that I've read places, the rate of psychopaths in leadership positions
00:29:06.080
between four times and 100 times higher than the general public, uh, depending on how you
00:29:11.740
define a psychopath and depending on which, uh, research paper you read, but it's, it's
00:29:16.700
They're definitely overrepresented in the halls of power.
00:29:20.740
So there's a certain type of person attracted to power, narcissistic, Machiavellian, psychopathic.
00:29:27.760
They, they've, they've got superficial charm and they're able to manipulate people and
00:29:35.700
And you think, well, that's a terrible, like, why do we even let these people get into positions
00:29:40.620
But then you highlight research saying like, well, actually followers, people who are
00:29:43.820
subordinates actually like those kinds of people and put those people in the power.
00:29:49.440
Why is it that we're attracted to people with these traits, but at the same time repulsed by
00:29:54.980
I mean, there's, there's, there's a few things that are, are worth mentioning here.
00:29:58.600
I mean, one of them is how narcissists, for example, make more money.
00:30:04.220
And, and this is, this has been shown in lots of research.
00:30:07.680
One of the reasons for that is because in, in sort of modest levels, medium levels, I should
00:30:12.360
say, narcissism can be advantageous for getting people to like you because part of being a narcissist
00:30:17.860
is an obsession with how other people perceive you.
00:30:21.140
And when you really care about that sort of perception management, it may be good for,
00:30:30.500
I mean, there, there are things about narcissists that are highly undesirable and it's not a
00:30:34.880
good strategy in general, but perhaps in the workplace in modest doses, it might be, you
00:30:40.140
And this helps explain why sometimes managers, politicians, et cetera, are so narcissistic
00:30:49.340
Now, I also think it's worth pointing out a lot of our leadership selection is non-rational.
00:30:56.340
And the reason that matters is because we like to think that we're making, you know, sort
00:31:00.840
of evidence-based rational assessments when we decide who to cast a ballot for or who we
00:31:08.500
But lots of scientific evidence counteracts that notion.
00:31:12.640
So the best example of this and the one that just sort of, it blew my mind when I read this,
00:31:18.060
It's a very solid finding published in, I forget if it was in science or nature, but
00:31:22.140
one of the top two scientific journals in the world.
00:31:25.060
What the researchers did is they showed children a series of faces, no other information, just
00:31:31.920
And they said, who do you want to be in charge of your ship in this computer simulation?
00:31:37.540
So all you see is two pictures of human faces and nothing else.
00:31:42.000
What the kids didn't know was that the two faces weren't random.
00:31:45.180
One of them was the winner of a French parliamentary election in a given district.
00:31:48.960
And the other face they saw was the runner up in that same district.
00:31:53.260
And overwhelmingly, the overwhelming majority of the time, the kids picked the winner to
00:32:00.520
And when they did this with adults, they got a similar result, which, you know, all it
00:32:04.760
says is that there's something about face that conveys leader to us.
00:32:09.480
And if that's the case, you know, that really causes us to sort of pause for a second and
00:32:15.560
say, wait a minute, if you can accurately predict the winner of an election based on faces alone,
00:32:20.820
then we have a real cognitive bias around leadership that we need to understand better because otherwise
00:32:26.640
we end up making stupid decisions based on superficial characteristics.
00:32:30.120
And I think the more that I read about this, you know, sort of realm of research in psychology
00:32:35.800
and evolutionary anthropology and so on, the more that it became clear to me that this
00:32:40.240
myth of rational leadership selection is just, it's just a myth.
00:32:45.740
And there are, there are some things that are rational and that are sort of reasoned in
00:32:49.460
terms of how we select our leaders, but a significant chunk of it is down to intuition and other
00:32:54.680
things that are not rooted in sort of a rational assessment.
00:32:58.000
So, uh, we've discussed, okay, there's a certain type of person attracted to power, oftentimes
00:33:05.240
We actually are attracted to those people sometimes, but let's talk about this idea of, of power
00:33:11.260
He said, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts.
00:33:14.180
And you see, your research says, yes, power does corrupt, can corrupt us.
00:33:17.500
So what is, what happens to us psychologically when we are put in positions of power and authority?
00:33:25.260
It changes us psychologically and it changes us physically.
00:33:28.000
There's, there's, there's a few things I'll point to.
00:33:30.020
I mean, I talk about this at length in the book, so I won't be able to talk about everything,
00:33:35.060
One is that you start to think about people below you in the hierarchy as abstractions.
00:33:40.560
And there's sort of this asymmetry that produces this view of, of being an abstraction.
00:33:44.520
And what I mean by this is that, you know, you think about why is it that many of us remember
00:33:51.680
like our boss's birthday and yet we're disappointed because our boss doesn't remember our birthday.
00:33:56.300
It's because there's an asymmetry there where you have, you know, in order to get ahead,
00:34:03.040
You need to be carefully attuned to the person above you in the hierarchy.
00:34:06.640
And as soon as you go up in the hierarchy, your success level is not necessarily predicated
00:34:11.880
on what other people below you think as much as people above you.
00:34:15.600
And so there starts to be this sort of discounting effect, which leads to abuse,
00:34:20.000
because as you become less interested in the sort of granular details of other people's
00:34:26.220
lives below you, it's easier to sort of discard them.
00:34:28.440
And there's lots of psychology research that shows that people in power become more reckless,
00:34:35.220
more willing to believe that they can affect outcomes that they can't actually affect.
00:34:47.400
One of the things that I remember that stood out to me is a very simple explanation of this.
00:34:52.440
When I was talking about the book early on, after it came out, I was interviewed by Andrew
00:34:58.040
Yang, who was the former presidential candidate on the Democratic side.
00:35:01.800
And I asked him, I said, you know, what was this like for you?
00:35:04.740
You all of a sudden got thrust in this position where you didn't have name recognition.
00:35:10.540
And he says it was super awful to have the sort of recognition that his mind was changing
00:35:19.040
by the basic fact that he walked into a room for a year.
00:35:24.460
Every joke he told, even if it sucked, they would laugh uproariously at, you know, the
00:35:36.160
But I think for people who don't experience that, it's hard to sort of understand how corrosive
00:35:41.340
it could be in your thoughts and sort of this idea you start to walk on water.
00:35:44.760
Now I said before that it also changes your physical basis.
00:35:48.700
And this I'm specifically talking about your brain chemistry.
00:35:51.220
And one of my favorite studies in the book, it's a fascinating world of research on macaque
00:35:57.300
monkeys, is a guy named Michael Nader, who's a professor and doctor out in Wake Forest,
00:36:06.860
And what he basically does is he takes these monkeys that are initially independently housed.
00:36:13.780
And then they sort of raise the barriers and put four monkeys together.
00:36:17.800
And within 10 minutes, the monkeys have established a hierarchy.
00:36:24.000
And then what they do is they put the monkeys in this chair that they've been trained to
00:36:27.720
use, where they either pull one lever and get banana pellets, food, or they pull the other
00:36:32.800
lever and they get cocaine intravenously injected into their bodies.
00:36:41.220
So the point is that when they do this, it always happens the same way.
00:36:46.440
The first and the second monkeys in the hierarchy, the top two, always take the banana pellets.
00:36:51.500
And the third and fourth, who end up in a subordinate position, always self-medicate with
00:36:56.660
And when you take the monkeys and rehouse them, if you were monkey one in the first housing
00:37:01.760
arrangement, and you end up as monkey four in the next one through bad luck or whatever,
00:37:09.620
And so what they found is that the dopamine receptors in the brain actually shift due to
00:37:16.360
They actually have a physical chemical change in their brains as a result of changing place
00:37:22.420
And this, you know, it's just, again, it's one of those hidden aspects where it's like,
00:37:26.340
okay, if we accept this, at least if we accept it's true in monkeys, it's very likely to be
00:37:32.240
So that really causes us to maybe think a bit more carefully about what we do when people
00:37:37.080
get immense, immense power, like they become presidents or congresspeople.
00:37:40.900
Because at that point, you sort of think something is actually changing about them and we don't
00:37:50.200
And I think there's some of this where we need to acknowledge that power does genuinely act
00:37:55.580
And we have to find ways to counteract it to make the world a little bit better place.
00:38:00.680
Yeah, the research about monkeys is really interesting because it seems like the lower
00:38:06.720
So they're going to go for the cocaine to self-medicate.
00:38:10.120
While the higher status monkeys, they've got power and then power acts like a natural drug.
00:38:15.360
So they don't need the cocaine to self-medicate.
00:38:18.400
But the downside is, you know, they want to hold on to that high.
00:38:22.840
So they're not going to want to give up their power.
00:38:24.640
So they're going to do whatever they have to do to stay on top.
00:38:30.180
If you look at the research, people who are higher in the social hierarchy, they often
00:38:34.660
live longer than people who are lower in the social hierarchy because they're feeling good.
00:38:38.600
While people who are, you know, lower in the social hierarchy, they've got more stress
00:38:48.360
Sometimes people who are in positions of power and authority, they live shorter lives.
00:38:53.800
And it has to do with whether that person in power or authority has any control.
00:38:59.160
So basically, the finding was, if you're in a position of authority, but you have no control,
00:39:08.840
So I'm afraid I'm going to go back to non-human primates with this example with baboons.
00:39:16.000
So the finding that you're talking about is from something with humans called the White
00:39:21.300
And Sir Professor, he's got both titles, Sir and Professor.
00:39:24.440
Michael Marmott is the guy who authored the study, one of my colleagues at University
00:39:29.200
And what he basically found is that, you know, if you control for a lot of confounding variables,
00:39:34.500
the actual data shows that being in a position of status that comes with stress but no control
00:39:43.560
Being low on the hierarchy without status and without control is even worse for you.
00:39:48.060
But it's actually pretty good for you if you have a position of sort of status, money and
00:39:53.820
And control meaning that you can sort of dictate how outcomes are happening in your life.
00:39:58.260
So a super stressed CEO during, you know, like an airline CEO during the pandemic, that
00:40:03.900
Being someone who's in charge of like a startup that's taking off, that's really good.
00:40:08.340
And so what you find in the baboon research that I think is really, really instructive is
00:40:14.140
using this technique called DNA methylation, you can actually measure biological aging separately
00:40:24.580
So, you know, maybe six months have passed, but your body has aged nine months, or maybe
00:40:30.240
And what they found is that when you look at baboons that rise through the ranks to become
00:40:34.580
the sort of alpha male, the worst, most stressed baboons are at the bottom.
00:40:42.540
It's, it basically sucks to be the worst baboon, right?
00:40:45.500
But as you rise through the ranks, it gets better until you become the alpha male.
00:40:52.980
And the reason for that is because you constantly have a target on your back.
00:40:56.140
So all the other baboons are thinking about usurping you, you sort of always have to worry
00:41:02.960
And so even though you have your pick of mates, and even though you have the prime food, your
00:41:07.600
body is actually aging faster because of all that stress.
00:41:11.320
And so the sort of takeaway that the way I put it is, you know, it's good to be in
00:41:17.980
And I think that's a lesson for all of us that actually it's different from what we
00:41:23.300
It's always sort of, you always want to be the alpha.
00:41:26.980
And the science seems to suggest actually that being close to power, but not dealing with
00:41:31.880
the stress of it might be the optimal thing for our bodies.
00:41:34.980
That stress and that paranoia, you see that with that janitor guy, right?
00:41:38.640
He started putting bombs on people's cars because he was worried that people were going
00:41:42.560
So that's another downside of being a business of power.
00:41:45.500
It might cause you to lash out and do just terrible things because you want to maintain
00:41:52.700
I mean, that's one of the classic traps that these people fall into, right?
00:41:55.940
They become so power obsessed that they end up destroying themselves.
00:42:00.540
And I think this is something where we've all seen this play out in, you know, whether
00:42:07.080
it's celebrity culture or politics or sports, whatever it is, where someone sort of just
00:42:12.400
thinks that they get high on their own supply, basically, right?
00:42:15.440
They start to believe the lies that they tell themselves about how great they are.
00:42:19.220
And when people cross them, they really lash out and undermine their own position.
00:42:23.420
So, you know, I mean, this is one of those things too, where it's sort of a red flag when
00:42:34.320
It's something that can help you accomplish certain goals.
00:42:36.940
It can help you, you know, change the world in some way.
00:42:40.540
And the people who view power as the ultimate aim are the exact wrong people to be in power.
00:42:46.520
And at any time that somebody is behaving that way, that's a major red flag that they need
00:42:51.960
Okay, so we've talked about, again, I want to reiterate, we've talked about the type,
00:42:56.460
the selection bias that comes with power, how power can corrupt us, can make us want to
00:43:01.140
break the rules, abstract people below us, depersonalize individuals.
00:43:05.960
But let's talk about this idea of the system that you find yourself in can actually cause
00:43:14.800
It's just that the way the power is manifested, right?
00:43:19.420
Yeah, so the sort of takeaway, the big takeaway is that rotten systems attract rotten people
00:43:26.760
And the evidence, I'll point to two studies briefly that I think are just, they're two
00:43:31.780
of the most fascinating pieces of research I came across in writing the book.
00:43:34.900
The first one is about the sort of self-selection effect based on the system.
00:43:40.500
So these economists ask these students to roll dice and they say, you know, roll a dice 42
00:43:45.740
times and write down what your score is each time.
00:43:49.280
But every time that you roll a six, we're going to give you some cash.
00:43:53.840
We're not going to check, you know, we're not going to watch you do it.
00:43:56.180
So you can lie, but we're going to do statistical analysis to figure out who lied and who didn't.
00:44:00.500
So one student in India, you know, kudos to him for brazenness.
00:44:05.640
He put down 42 sixes in a row trying to get 42 times the cash.
00:44:09.880
You know, it was pretty easy to spot that he'd lied.
00:44:11.980
But, you know, there were different levels of dishonesty in these groups.
00:44:15.840
What was fascinating, though, is that because they could figure out using statistical methods
00:44:20.020
who was likely to have lied and who wasn't, they then asked the students, what do you want
00:44:25.620
And in India, a place where being a civil servant, you know, being sort of the local cop
00:44:32.220
or the local bureaucrat means you can extract bribes from people.
00:44:35.700
In India, the people who lied about their dice rolls to make more money were disproportionately
00:44:42.800
When they did the exact same study in Denmark, the result was flipped.
00:44:46.600
The people who lied about their dice rolls did not want to go into civil service.
00:44:50.560
And the people who were scrupulously honest did.
00:44:53.000
And so, you know, it's this classic sort of story of if you have a clean system, people
00:44:58.160
who are more willing to behave in clean, uncorrupt ways are going to go for that system.
00:45:04.060
Now, the other study that I think really beautifully illustrates this point is about United Nations
00:45:11.660
And I know it sounds like a weird realm to explore, but it's sort of a natural experiment
00:45:15.460
where before 2002, anybody who parked illegally in New York who was a diplomat had diplomatic
00:45:21.840
immunity and therefore didn't have to pay their fine.
00:45:24.440
So these diplomats rack up 150,000, believe it or not, parking tickets to the tune of $18
00:45:30.980
And finally, in 2002, the mayor of the time, Mike Bloomberg, says enough is enough.
00:45:35.400
Not only are you annoying because you're parking illegally all the time, but it's also a revenue
00:45:40.600
So we can't force you to pay it, but we can take away your cars.
00:45:43.460
We can impound your cars if you keep doing this.
00:45:49.920
Well, in the pre-enforcement period where they can get away with everything, there's
00:45:57.920
So the people who are from Norway, Japan, Germany, the sort of non-corrupt countries,
00:46:05.040
And the people who are from the corrupt countries, Yemen, Egypt, et cetera, are parking extremely
00:46:12.040
The average number of parking tickets per diplomat in the worst country was, I think, 190 parking
00:46:21.280
And overnight, when the enforcement kicks in, they basically all become Norway.
00:46:27.880
And the kicker, though, is that the longer the Norwegians and Germans and Japanese diplomats
00:46:32.820
were in New York in the pre-enforcement period, in other words, the longer they could get away
00:46:36.940
with it, the more they started to park like the Yemenis and the Egyptians.
00:46:40.080
So the lesson is that cultures of corruption are obviously important in dictating behavior,
00:46:45.520
but accountability is also super, super important in deterring bad behavior once you
00:46:54.380
You need to attract good people into positions of power.
00:46:57.220
You need to clean up the system to attract better people.
00:46:59.940
And then within that good system, you need to really crack down on the people who behave
00:47:07.000
And it's not, again, it's not rocket science, but most of our systems aren't designed with
00:47:13.600
In other words, there's not like a systematic attempt to think very carefully about both
00:47:20.300
And I think if every organization just did sort of an assessment of these aspects, the
00:47:25.180
world would become a much better place quite quickly.
00:47:27.080
Because as I say, the interventions are not difficult.
00:47:31.140
They just involve serious thought about designing systems to attract and promote better people
00:47:36.840
and to weed out those who are breaking the rules.
00:47:39.840
Well, let's say someone's listening to this and they're put into a position of power
00:47:43.380
Whether it's at work or the homeowner association, like individually, like any insights from your
00:47:48.740
research for that person to be like, I don't want to become a crazy homeowner association
00:47:57.860
Like what sort of, I guess, breaks can you put on yourself so that doesn't happen to you?
00:48:03.980
So first off, I'd say that if you're one of these good people that's sort of driven
00:48:07.380
by service, these corrosive effects of power are less likely to be as much of a problem.
00:48:12.180
You've already solved half the problem because you're not a power hungry, megalomaniac,
00:48:18.480
The other half, though, is that all of us will succumb to some of the psychological effects
00:48:22.660
of power no matter what, even the best of us, right?
00:48:24.520
I mean, there's pretty strong evidence that this does something to you over time.
00:48:29.680
And the best of us can counteract it, but it's not always a sort of bulletproof thing.
00:48:37.020
One is that you need to engineer systems in which you are constantly reminded of the weight
00:48:43.640
So if you're dealing with difficult decisions that result in harm for people, if you have
00:48:47.780
to fire people, if you have to make decisions that make people really unhappy or hurt people,
00:48:52.620
you should be well aware of the costs of those decisions.
00:48:55.920
I'm not going to go into the whole detail of it here, but I briefly talk about this in
00:48:59.700
the book with a guy who was involved in doling out money for the 9-11 Victims Compensation
00:49:05.260
He went through the excruciating process of meeting with every victim's family face to
00:49:12.020
face when he was trying to decide how much their life was worth financially because he
00:49:18.300
He said, the second that this becomes abstract to me is the second I need to get out of this
00:49:22.720
job because it has to be a reminder of how important this work is.
00:49:27.180
And I think that's true even in the smaller stages of power.
00:49:29.220
You need to be reminded of the effects of your decisions when you are affecting other
00:49:35.680
The other is just around sort of systems of power is engaging in a sort of team of rivals
00:49:42.840
The team of rivals is a term that refers to the way Abraham Lincoln set up his cabinet,
00:49:47.440
where he basically made people who were his rivals, right?
00:49:50.660
They were like genuinely sometimes adversaries of his debate, major subjects in front of
00:49:58.240
And they would tell him when he was being a moron.
00:50:00.720
And, you know, he would, he would encourage this basically because he thought it would
00:50:03.700
cut him down to size, remind him of different viewpoints, et cetera.
00:50:07.780
You contrast this with the Vladimir Putin approach to leadership of the current age.
00:50:12.800
And you're surrounded by yes men, you know, and in fact, people who cross you might go to
00:50:18.200
And you can think about what does that do to you?
00:50:20.600
I mean, you know, it's, it's something where if you proactively try to ensure that you are
00:50:24.900
checked, you're more likely to behave in a reasonable manner.
00:50:28.780
If you behave in a way where you think I am powerful and therefore people should defer to
00:50:34.720
me, you're more likely to miscalculate and abuse people because you never get differing
00:50:39.380
So some of this is possible to sort of proactively mitigate, but I will say that most of the
00:50:47.180
psychologists who study power argue that all of us would succumb at least to some extent
00:50:53.580
to some of the corrosive aspects of power if we were there long enough, which is why
00:50:57.380
you might want to rotate people around and indeed not have everybody inhabit a position
00:51:05.260
Well, Brian, this has been a great conversation.
00:51:06.680
Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
00:51:11.500
So Corruptible, Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us is the book and anywhere that you
00:51:16.000
You know, if you've got a local bookshop, by all means, go there.
00:51:22.200
And if people are interested, I also have a podcast called Power Corrupts, which is a podcast
00:51:27.320
about all the sort of dark sides of humans and the way we screw up the world and what we
00:51:40.240
It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.
00:51:42.180
You can find more information about his work at his website, brianpkloss.com.
00:51:48.660
Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash power corrupts, where you find links to resources
00:51:53.980
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast.
00:52:03.700
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00:52:05.960
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