Does power turn sheep into wolves, chickens into foxes, and horses into donkeys?

In the late 1930s, a man fresh out of law school was trying his first case when the judge threatened to disqualify him: "I have serious doubts whether you have the necessary ethical qualifications to practice law," the judge told him. the lawyer. The lawyer's name was Richard Nixon.

At the time, Nixon admitted that he had taken questionable actions without his client's authorization. Power didn't transform him, but when he became president people understood more about who he was.

Consider another lawyer, Lincoln. Being president brought out the best in him. As Lincoln biographer Robert Green Ingersoll says: “Nothing reveals the true character of a man more than the use of power. If you want to know what a man really is, give him power.”

Although for decades, psychologists have been convinced that power corrupts human characters, the results of the classic Stanford prison experiment, where students were randomly assigned to play the role of prisoners or prison guards, were shocking. The student guards ended up stripping the prisoners of their clothes and forcing their comrades to sleep on the concrete floor.

"In just a few days, our guards became sadists," said psychologist Philip Zimbardo.

Beyond the results, another detail was even more critical: the characteristics of the students who showed up to participate in the "prison life experiment." Prison study volunteers were 26 percent more aggressive, 12 percent more narcissistic, and 10 percent more autocratic and Machiavellian than people who volunteered for the study. other psychological ones that were not related to power.

The nature of people who desire power, even the way they will use it, should not surprise us, it is clearly defined by their identities before they come to power.

Power does not always transform or corrupt," said author Robert Caro, reflecting on Lyndon B. Johnson. "Power always reveals. Sufficient POWER reveals what man is and has always wanted to do.”

Well, "the alibi that people are corrupted or transformed as soon as they come to power, or as the prime minister says that "the seat of power is a wild animal that is letting it enter your body, fill your pocket but take your mind" is an exculpatory lie to hide the sin, that those who are placed and kept in the seats of power by caste select such "broken from the egg".

Power does not turn a sheep into a wolf, a chicken into a fox, a horse into a donkey!

The flourishing of wolves, foxes and donkeys cannot be justified by the transformation they undergo in power, but by the fact that they are such that they did not take power.