189 | Brian Klaas on Power and the Temptation of Corruption

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 21 March 2022

⏱️ 83 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

All societies grant more power to some citizens, and there is always a temptation to use that power for the benefit of themselves rather than for the greater good. Power corrupts, we are told — but to what extent is that true? Would any of us, upon receiving great power, be tempted by corruption? Or are corruptible people drawn to accrue power? Brian Klaas has investigated these questions by looking at historical examples and by interviewing hundreds of people who have been in this position. He concludes that power can corrupt, but it doesn’t necessarily do so — we can construct safeguards to keep corruption to a minimum.

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Brian Klaas received his D.Phil. in Politics from the University of Oxford. He is currently Associate Professor in Global Politics at University College London and a columnist for The Washington Post. His new book is Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How it Changes Us. He is host of the Power Corrupts podcast.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll.
0:03.6	And you know, sometimes I'm amazed that society works at all. It's the ultimate emergent phenomenon,
0:10.8	right? We have all these agents, all these individual people. They have their own agendas. They
0:14.8	have their own desires, motivations. They have their own capacities and abilities, right? And somehow
0:20.6	they come together to form a society. Now, sometimes the society is a little bit more well-ordered
0:26.0	than others, but it generally happens, this sort of organization. Sometimes it's top down,
0:31.6	there's an autocratic dictatorship. Increasingly in the modern world, it is bottom up. People
0:37.1	actually get to vote for who leads us. But inevitably, there will be some flaws in the system,
0:42.4	right? There will be individuals who are not necessarily civic-minded, who nevertheless
0:47.4	get a lot of power, right? They're not in it for the greater good. They're in it for their own good,
0:52.8	but either we elect them or they seize power somehow. This is a problem. This is a problem for
0:58.1	how society works. It's a very broad problem. A specific aspect of it is the idea of corruption.
1:04.8	The idea that once people get into positions of power, they do things to benefit themselves,
1:10.6	rather than working for the good of society. So what is this corruption? How do we think about it?
1:15.9	And how do we get rid of it? Does power corrupt, in other words, if we take perfectly decent people
1:21.3	and put them in positions of power, do they automatically become corrupt? Or are people who are
1:26.4	corruptible those who want to seek power and therefore use it to their own advantages? Today's
1:31.5	guest is Brian Claus, who is an associate professor in global politics at University College London.
1:37.0	He's also a columnist for the Washington Post and he has his own podcast, The Power Corrupts
1:41.9	Podcast, appropriately enough. And his new book is called Corruptible, Who Gets Power and How It
1:47.4	Changes Us. He studied exactly this question of if you take a whole bunch of people, give them
1:52.4	power, do they all become more corrupt or are there ways that corruptable people are able to
	...

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