Power Trip
“If power were a prescription drug, it would come with a long list of known side effects. It can intoxicate. It can corrupt. It can even make Henry Kissinger believe that he’s sexually magnetic. But can it cause brain damage?” According to some research, having a lot of power over a period of time can lead one to lose some of the mental capacities that helped them to amass the power in the first place. A UC Berkeley professor named Dacher Keltner spent decades researching the brains of the powerful, and he found that the they often “acted as if they had suffered a traumatic brain injury — becoming more impulsive, less risk-aware, and, crucially, less adept at seeing things from other people’s point of view.” (I suffer many of the same side effects, but mine came from using social media too much.) From The Atlantic: Power Causes Brain Damage. It’s like the old adage: Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power tweets absolutely.