Good Guys Want to Win
On power
Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love. –Martin Luther King, Jr.
It’s natural to regard power with suspicion because power is a necessary precondition for great evil: Dictators need armies to oppress the masses; capitalists need wealth to exploit the worker; celebrities need fame to stifle the whispers of their wrongdoing. I’m sure you can think of your own examples.
But while power is necessary for evil, it is not on its own sufficient. After all, it’s not difficult to find positive examples too (if perhaps not quite as easy as for the negative ones): Abraham Lincoln; MLK; Malala Yousafzai. Again, you can take your pick. These individuals show that power-seeking is not inherently evil. Power—in all its forms and faces—is a means that can be wielded toward a variety of ends.
For this reason, if you have genuine belief in your own cause, it’s actually a mistake not to accumulate greater resources or influence. The more money you have, the greater volume of charitable donations you can make; the bigger your social media following, the wider you can spread a message to help humanity. When LeBron James has a path to the basket, it’s not selfish from the team’s perspective for him to try and score; the selfish act would be to pass.
Of course there are a couple cliched ways power-seeking can go wrong. Many aspirants are deluded about their own motivations, or they overestimate the goodness of the ends they will achieve. And even those who seek power with the noblest of intentions can become corrupted or Goodharted along the way: Wealth or fame acquired for instrumental reasons becomes a target in its own right. Choose wise allies in your quest—and remember to pack a mirror.
If you’ve ever crossed paths—as we all have—with people who are nakedly self-serving or sociopathic, it’s easy to think these power-seekers are the norm rather than the exception. In fact, I think the vast majority of us err in the opposite direction: Fearing judgment or dilution of our values, we refrain from doing anything that resembles striving, self-promotion, or open competition. We place purity of motivation above magnitude of impact.
Ultimately, the choice we face is not between benevolent selflessness and ruthless ambition. The benevolent path and ambitious path are frequently one and the same. And if good people do not seek power and wield it responsibly, somebody else will.