- So the start of everyone's view
on power begins with that quote
power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
The real world is much more complicated than that.
It is definitely true by the way, that power does corrupt.
We have plenty of evidence
that it changes your psychology, it changes your brain,
but it's only a small part of the story.
And the much more interesting part
of the story is how people interact with systems
and why we end up with the wrong people in charge.
A major hidden part of this iceberg
where we just sort of see the tip,
the power corrupting, the bad people doing bad things
is a series of broken systems that attract
and promote the wrong kinds of people into power.
Where people who are power hungry,
which we usually use to say bad,
those people are far more likely to seek power
in the first place
and very often they're better at getting it.
So we can always just blame the individual.
We can also always just blame the power
and say, power corrupts.
The smarter solution is to try to design systems
that attract all of the right people
into power so we get better outcomes.
And that is the task I think for the 21st century
because it's a problem that we have not solved.
Pretty much everybody you speak to is disappointed
with those people who end up in charge.
My name is Brian Klaas,
I'm an associate professor
in global politics at University College London
and a contributing writer for the Atlantic Magazine.
And my book is called Corruptible
who Gets Power and How It Changes Us.
I started studying political science
and I was studying rigged elections and political violence.
And so I went around the world
and I met former heads of state in authoritarian regimes,
people who had been accused of war crimes.
And I ended up in the room with a lot of really
awful people who had done some really awful things.
And what was striking to me was
that when I came back to talk to people about this,
some of them recognized these sorts of personality traits
in their bosses or in their homeowner's associations,
sort of a germ of an idea was placed in my head
about is it possible that these traits are universal
in power seekers and power holders?
One of the problems with power is that you often
have people who are drawn to it like moths to a flame.
In this small community in Arizona that I studied,
there was a particularly egregious example of
a homeowner's association president
that I call Martin McFife, I've changed his name.
Martin McFife was someone who coveted power.
He didn't wanna help his community,
he just liked the control.
So what he did was he began to purge
the homeowner's association of his rivals
and then he began establishing arcane bureaucratic rules.
You couldn't have out-of-state gravel in your garden,
you had to trim the palm trees in exactly the right way,
and if you didn't do this, he would fine you.
As a result, some of these homeowners began to push back.
They began to try to institute a recall election
to unseat him from his throne of power
and he began to target them.
Occasionally, some homeowners who stood up
to McFife had rocks thrown through their windows.
As McFife falls, he's unable to accept the loss of power.
He drives around the neighborhood taking pictures
of people who haven't trimmed their palm trees to his liking
and trying to send these really nutty newsletters
around the community, accusing people
of being enemies of the neighborhood.
Martin McFife illustrates a key point
which is self-selection bias.
Self-selection bias refers to a phenomenon
in which people who are power hungry,
people who are psychopaths tend to self-select
into positions of power more than the rest of us.
And as a result, we have this skew, this bias
in positions of power where certain types of people
often the wrong kinds of people
are more likely to put themselves forward
to rule over the rest of us.
And that's the start of any sort
of diagnosis that can lead us
to a solution because the people who end up in power
are not representative of the rest of us.
They are not average and they are not normal.
Once you accept that,
then you can start to counteract those problems.
One of the most uncomfortable questions to answer
is are we to blame?
Why are we drawn to people who are clearly not
in the business of public service but want to abuse us
and often show us that they are strong men who are oriented
towards conquering and dominating rather than serving us?
And that puts the mirror back on us.
And the answer is partly to do with evolutionary psychology.
In times of crisis in the very distant past
it helped us survive to turn
towards a large physically strong man.
And that's because the challenges that prehistoric societies
faced were often a threat from a warring tribe or something
in which physical prowess and strength actually mattered.
When you look at the modern society that we inhabit,
this is no longer true.
We have massive numbers
of examples of excellent female leaders
who can't bench press as much
as a world-leading bodybuilder.
So this is what's called evolutionary mismatch.
Now we still have that template in our brains.
It's maladaptive,
it hurts us to still have this cognitive bias
and yet it still exists.
For example, if you ask people to select a leader
if you prime them, if you say
imagine that you're facing a famine, a war, some sort
of catastrophe, then what people tend to do is they turn
towards the physically stronger male leader
at a disproportionate rate.
Modern leaders know this.
I think it's by design, for example
that Vladimir Putin often poses shirtless,
that he tends to present himself as a strong man.
He often manufactures crises, he invents them
in order to show that I alone can fix it.
And here I am, by the way, shirtless on a horse.
The term by the way, is no accident.
Strong man means strong man,
and that's why dictators tend to be men.
What I think is that we need to accept
that some of these biases are lurking inside of our heads.
They're the product of tens
of thousands of years of evolution.
They're maladaptive now.
They're not good for us, but only by accepting
and recognizing them can we start to counteract them.
If we're gonna focus on fixing this problem
we have to think very carefully about systems.
If you're in a corrupt police department,
if you're in a corrupt bureaucracy
everybody around you is skirting the rules.
A lot of the people around you are breaking the rules
they're abusing them, but it's normal.
It's what's done.
So the system is this key mediating factor.
Trying to change a bad leader is hard.
Changing systems is something that we can actually achieve.
I think part of the problem is we don't
systematically evaluate these questions when we have choices
about who to recruit
or how to hire someone or how to promote someone.
So what I often will tell people is imagine
that the worst person in the world is trying
to get the job that you are advertising for.
Imagine that the worst person
in the world is running for the political office
in your political party or in your election.
Now, design every system with that idea in mind.
You then have screening processes to try to weed them
out during the actual recruitment process.
If they manage to wriggle through
you have checks and oversight to basically eliminate them
from those posts of power if they've made it that far.
And then when it comes to promotion and the top jobs
that's where scrutiny has to be the absolute most robust
because those people are the ones who do the most damage.
The Enron scandals, the major abuses of power, those happen
in the corner offices where nobody is checking your chair,
no one's monitoring your screen.
Rather than trying to punish
and regulate every person who might steal a paperclip,
think about the people who can actually bring the company
down and inflict enormous damage on our societies.
You're always going to have power hungry people show
up and try to take power.
What you need to do is dilute them and block them.
And that's where the system design is crucial.
And I think we haven't thought carefully
about that in a series of roles of power around modern life.
We just sort of assume we can advertise
for a position or advertise for a promotion
and wait for the right people to come.
It doesn't work like that.
We have to actively counteract this impulse
of power-hungry people to seek and abuse power.
And when we design systems in an intelligent way
we can screen out
and topple the Martin McFifes of this world