The Privilege Of Leadership

It is easy to think of how corrupt politicians can get, and how they stop serving their countries and wind up serving themselves instead. I am sure we can find many extreme examples of such bad behavior, and it's even more common to find incompetent leadership all over the place. At this point, my question is...why?

A leader cannot generally come to power of her own strength. Hitler certainly didn't go up there simply by shouting everyone else down. It was a gradual build up of power that eventually hit a critical mass, then became a self sustaining political engine. Clearly, even really bad leaders have had their moments of competence and become (more) corrupt afterwards. Such is the privilege of leadership: power corrupts.

However, such a statement seems overly glib. Power corrupts. Why? Power allows people to do many things, yes, but that also means that good leaders can enrich themselves without having to impoverish their people. Clearly something else went wrong. I think a part of that problem comes from the privilege of leadership whereby the leader winds up surrounded by similarly privileged people and becomes increasingly distanced from the general population. This distancing is more perceptual than physical, since they start to develop tunnel vision whereby their perceptible world becomes richer than average and they start to believe that the country itself is doing fine.

It is effectively what happened when Communist leaders started believing their own propaganda. Such a thing sounds logically impossible: you generated the lie yourself, so how can you possibly be fooled by it? Yet it happens, because human perception seeks patterns, and a statement that is repeated often enough becomes perceptual truth at least at a subconscious level. What can be done about this particular aspect of the problem? I don't know for sure, but having the leaders constantly exposed to the woes of the commoners is very likely a good start.