Another part of the picture is suggested by the statement from the author David Brin:
It is said that power corrupts, but actually it’s more true that power attracts the corruptible.”
According to this view, if we see a great deal of corruption in the
arena of power –and regrettably we surely do– it is because the kinds
of people who choose to participate in power’s games are a non-random
and morally sub-par group.
This view has a good deal of truth to it, methinks. Power is indeed
an arena in which a zer0-sum game is enacted, and it therefore attracts
a disproportionate number of those who want more than their fair share.
(See for example an earlier essay of mine, “Evil and the Oval Office: A
Half-Baked Idea,” at www.nonesoblind.org/blog/?p=394.)
It would be comforting to think that the extent of corruption one
sees in the sphere of power were solely a reflection of this process of
selection and self-selection that brings the corrupt forward to fill
powerful positions. If prison guards tend toward the sadistic, one
might conclude, it is because the role of prison guard is likely to be
sought by people who wish to fill a role in which their sadism can
express itself.
But then there’s that famous Stanford study in which students were
randomly divided into guards and prisoners for the sake of an
experiment, and in which the guards began rather quickly to manifest
sadistic behaviors toward the prisoners, who as a group were
indistinguishable from themselves just a few days before.
These “guards” were not an especially “corruptible” group who,
because of their tendencies, were attracted to that powerful role.
I’m inclined to regard power less as a transformer of people’s
character, as Acton asserts, than as source of opportunity: the
possession of power permits people to make manifest a part of their
nature that previously was hidden. Not that power corrupts. Rather,
power gives people a chance to express impulses that others –those who
are weak, and thus subject to the will of others, and those who act
among equals who require them to stay within certain boundaries– keep a
lid on.
This is a darker view than Lord Acton’s. And darker also than
Brin’s. For it declares that there is corruption already embedded in
the character of a great many people, and that giving such people the
wider scope of action that comes with power simply serves as an
invitation to put forth into the world the darkness that is already
there.
And then, as people are also shaped by the actions they have taken,
Lord Acton’s dictim comes in again: having enacted their worst
impulses, people are also transformed into something more corrupt than
they had been. Were those Stanford students undiminished by what they
had done? Were Hitler’s Willing Executioners not degraded by their
crimes? Power, by enabling corrupt actions, does corrupt.
Note, however, that I am NOT maintaining that such corruption is
universal. Not ALL the prison guards in the Stanford experiment became
sadistic. And not ALL the people who gain power in our world use it for
corrupt purposes. Some rulers have used their power justly, for the
good, without abuse, without corrupt and self-serving intent.
But there’s a final point to be made– a point of a wholly different
sort: when someone in power participates in corruption, it is not
necessarily a sign of corruption of character.
Imagine a person in a position of power who has reliable access to
divine guidance. And suppose that the nature of this divine guidance is
reliably moral in a consequentialist sense of the word. In other words,
the guidance tells this powerful person which action among those
available will do the most to make the world a better place. And
imagine, finally, that this person invariably follows that
moral/consequentialist counsel.
This thoroughly uncorrupted person in power, I am asserting, will
often be guided to choose a course of action that involves him in
corruption. [Note: as I speak of “he” and “him” I wish those pronouns
to be understood as also including “she” and “her.”]
If our hypothetical powerful and uncorrupt person possessed
COMPLETE power, this would not be the case. He could simply decide
always and only for the good, and so it would be. But in the actual
world, no one’s power is ever so total as that. And therefore, to to
accomplish good, he will need to make common cause with others.
If he were in an ideal world, making common cause with others in
order to achieve the good would not require our sterling leader to
become complicit in corruption. But the real world in which he must
operate is far from ideal. And among the others with whom he must make
common cause there will be some who are corrupt.
A prototypical instance of this is the need, in World War II, for
the democracies to make alliance with Stalin, a tyrant on whose hands
was already the blood of many millions of his own (Soviet) people
before the war had even begun. Another instance is how the creators of
the New Deal required as allies the segregationist powers of the Jim
Crow South.
Such instances could be multiplied almost endlessly.
This is always one of the consequences of choosing to operate in
the realm of power– at least for those who are willing to accept that
part of the responsibility that comes with power is the duty to achieve
as much good as possible for the world, even though accomplishing that
means inevitably that one must get one’s “hands dirty.”
This, incidentally, presents one of the greatest challenges facing
citizens in their search for good leaders: how to differentiate between
those who indulge in corruption because that suits their purposes, and
those who participate in corruption as the necessary means of
accomplishing truly good purposes.
So we have a fourth dimension of the relationship between power and
corruption. Lord Acton is probably right that power tends to corrupt,
and Brin right that power attracts the corruptible (and the corrupt).
And power also affords people the opportunity to show the corrupt
tendencies they’d previously kept hidden.
And finally, participation in power also requires even the uncorrupt to participate in the corruption of the world.
Writings 
The idea that power and corruption stand in some meaningful relationship was encapsulated and as if carved into stone by Lord Acton, when he famously said:
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