“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.” Lord Acton (1834-1902)
Because we are apes and adopting an ape culture, we worship a cosmic alpha male… and we call it “God”. God of course is not a definite or a real entity, it’s the concept of ultimate power and world domination… god represents all the hidden (not that hidden) desires of the ego. Every believer adoring and singing for this arrogant notion of world domination by some guy, is just suffering from its own misery, weakness and helplessness… the louder he/she shouts for god the more inferiority it’s suffering. We all need power, more power, no power can be enough… but what can anyone do with all the powers?! God don’t use his powers a lot, may be the omnipotent god sleeps a lot… the world looks like godless (a lot of grass needs cutting).
Power has many aspects in the human phenomena: wealth, authority, technology, guns, knowledge, sex appeal, physical strength, persuasive abilities and else… everyone wants more powers to be dominant and superior. And almost everyone assumes that the kind of powers he or she already possess some of is the best and the dominant kind of power… like the wealthy man who claims that money can buy everything, or the man of authority who claims that the state shall dominate all aspects of life, or the strong man claiming that muscles can solve all problems or the scientist claiming that ignorance ruins everything, and so on.
Every human has powers that affect itself and others, but most of us are actually not using or even abusing these powers and self-deceived by these powers on daily bases. You can watch how the human parents raise their children, abusing them in many ways and spoiling them in many other ways (spoiling is abusing)… they are corrupted by the amount of authority on their own children that they don’t deserve to possess because they are not morally capable to handle this power on the little helpless humans. Every one of us is also corrupted by the amount of money he/she can got, spending our economic power on superficial stuff all the time.
It’s a fact we don’t need all the powers we have got to survive or to have a good standard of living, but the real motivation for possessing more powers is just to prove that the one is not a small man or a small woman. It’s about the “Superiority Complex”, someone is suffering from the feeling of its own inferiority and insignificance… so it’s trying hard, trying desperately to prove himself or herself as important, superior, dominant and even godly. And as much as the suffering of inferiority as much as the motivation to do socially great things, possessing more powers, having authority or leverage on more people. The small man who has been abused by other people’s powers (may be his parents), felt helpless under other’s authorities… is also the man who always abuses others with his own powers so he can finally prove that he is a big abuser too.
That’s why powers are not mainly used wisely on conditioning or taming the environment for the human living and on managing social activities in order to maximize the benefits for everyone, no we mostly have done that already ages ago… all the powers within the human societies are mainly an expression of the small people’s ego more than an expression of actual necessities to handle dangers and opportunities. We like to think that we control our powers more than our powers control us.
We like to think that we can handle guns, not guns are the factor that make us aggressive and abusive… actually just holding a gun in a pocket can make a small man very arrogant and offensive. We like to think that we can handle money, not money is the factor that make us consumptive and lazy… small women may feel like owning the whole world and the whole population by possessing a not-that-big amount of money. Wealth, authority, technology, guns, knowledge, symmetric shapes (beauty), physical capabilities (strength, speed, etc.), persuasive skills… and every other sort of power or leverage control us and shape us much more than we use them or depend on them.
Even a small amount of powers for someone corruptible, small, rejected or neglected and desperate for powers can highly corrupt and make a real monster… like chemical knowledge to a terrorist. So regardless specific information about how corruptible people can be, and how they are vulnerable to spoiling and abusing… imagine how corrupt the wealthiest people or the leaders of nations can be. The human species is so corruptible in its very basic nature, and it’s not about money or authority or raising kids or knowledge or technology… corruption and inefficiency are in our genes, in our meat and blood.
Someone may try hard to remain with a very small amount of powers, train itself to handle it morally and rationally in order to let itself get more powers… but certainly it’ll fail. No human ape can preserve morality and efficiency in its behavior for real and for long, it’s so beyond the human capabilities… that requires a robot with no ego and a full commitment by the moral code. If you are efficient in your work probably your aren’t at home, if you are efficient socially probably you aren’t naturally, and if you think that you are efficient naturally and socially probably you aren’t mentally… and so on. Also not every human have something to respect or to care about, not a lot of people have a purpose for living or moral values, something you have to make a plan to achieve and you strictly commit by… only a real passion and a real belief (not religions and elsewise superstitions) are capable of making someone (relatively of course) control its ID and its EGO, or even try.
But we humans are mainly subjective, we just live to maintain our genes by submission to natural selection and sexual selection… like every other living thing. Although a real value system and a reasonable moral code shall seek something outside the person, something objective and unhuman (beyond humanity). People are mainly libidinous and egoistic not objective nor fair, they just don’t care about anything beyond their small existence. That’s why they prefer capitalism, profit incentive, greed and consumption based economy and financial inequality… more than socialism (as a concept), common good incentive, altruism, collaboration based economy and financial inequality. We humans are not moral creatures, we are not designed to be… human apes are designed to compete and fight more than to cooperate and work together like ants or bees.
Scientific Socialism 