Remember J. J. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings where “One Ring to rule the other Rings of Power” changed the behaviour of those who got hold of the powerful exotic ring by making them addicted to power.
Well, this has empirical basis.
According to Cato’s Julian Sanchez, (bold highlights mine)
The humor site Cracked rounds up some serious social science on the psychological effects of power and authority. The results are sobering—if not entirely surprising. When people in experimental environments were made to feel as though they were powerful—either by recalling actual instances for their lives or by being placed in simulated positions of power for a few hours—researchers found that they became less compassionate, less prone to take the perspective of others, more able to lie without feeling guilty about it, and more prone to consider themselves exempt from the rules and standards they righteously insist apply to others. What’s striking is how quickly and easily the experimenters elicited dramatic behavioral differences given that (unlike people who actively seek power) their “powerful” and control groups were randomly chosen.
Simply said, entities who acquire political power would most likely see a shift in perspectives and in attitudes. In short, ideology or platform becomes a secondary issue to ego.
And this is one reason why public image seems to be a foremost concern for politcos. Aside from the need to get re-elected they see popularity as feeding on their bloated self-esteem.
And applied to politics, this seems like a prominent reason why the public’s romanticized expectations of “changes” from new leadership usually ends up in frustration—the public fails to account for the risks of individual character shifts of the political leaders when assuming power.
Again Mr. Sanchez,
It’s useful to keep this in mind because, while the overwhelming lesson of the last half century of social psychology is that situational influences can easily swamp the effect of individual differences in character, our political rhetoric takes scant account of this. Political campaigns focus heavily on questions of “character”—which especially in the case of “outsider” campaigns should be of limited predictive value....The remedy is, invariably, to replace them in positions of power with better people from the other team. These social science results suggest that this is unlikely to work: The problem is power itself.
Lord Acton was right, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
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