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Zen-ish Thoughts About Political, Corporate, and Religious Power

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” – Lord Acton, 1877.

“Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect any who seek it.” – Frank Herbert, in Dune, 1985.

Both of the above are true, but there is something even more fundamental than that in play. Corruption aside, people who are attracted to power are people who are attracted to power. Power itself is problematic, even in the absence of corruption.

Imagine a personal relationship with an obvious power gradient, like the idealized 1950s marriage. It may have seemed glorious then, even to many of the women who were harmed and hemmed in by it, but in today's sensibilities we see it has inescapably unhealthy. I think we have it right this time.

There are no two people who are peers in all the many, complex dimension of human life. Someone will be better at managing the finances, and someone will be better at managing the household. Maybe those two happen to be the same someone. Someone will be able to make more money, and the other person less. Someone will be more skilled in their handling of relationship challenges, and the other person less so … The list is endless. But no item on that list should read, "One is better at X, so the other person should have no voice." No item should read, "One is not as good at X, so they should just shut up and go along." Let alone asserting that who is good at what is an unvarying law of nature based on gender.

Will a sensible couple be practical enough to default certain tasks to one partner and others to the other? Certainly. If one person craves power, will that get distorted into something unhealthy very quickly? Certainly. Should the "junior partner" in a particular domain be the silent partner, the unconsulted partner? Certainly not. Will the person less skilled in and less experienced in a given area nonetheless sometimes have really good ideas? Certainly. For the health of the relationship, should both partners be included in a discussion of anything consequential and many things that are not? Yes.

Companies and societies have the same dynamics. A division of labor is necessary and helpful. A gross power imbalance is destructive. And … companies and societies have gross power imbalances by design.

Now, add it all together: Politicians are very likely to be attracted to power, or they'd be doing something else. Politicians are very likely to be corruptible, or we wouldn't see what we do see every day in the news. Politicians operate in an environment that overflows with opportunities, invitations, and even requirements to be corrupted – this is very well documented. Not a great starting point for good governance of a country, or of a company.

Why has democracy repeatedly devolved into abusive oligarchy, even though the premise of democracy is egalitarian and humanistic? Why has communism also repeatedly devolved into abusive oligarchy, even though the premise of communism is to have an egalitarian, classless society? For that matter, why has religion so reliably devolved into an abusive oligarchy, even though the premise of each religion is that it is the way to make every human life the best it can be? Why are companies so given to devolving into abusive oligarchies, even if they have a sincerely held prosocial purpose?

I put it to you that the reason for these things is that all of these inherently have very steep power dynamics, the people in positions of power in each of these enterprises are primarily people who are drawn to power, and steep power gradients ensure bad relationships – between individuals, and between "leadership" and everyone else.

There is no such thing as not having leaders, and this becomes more and more the case the larger our companies, countries, religions, and the world population get. So, how can we function with strong leadership, but with less power mongering?

One useful way to think about this is to ask: What happens when someone enters that world who is genuinely indifferent to the accumulation of power, and just wants to do a good job? It turns out this is a very hard question to answer with examples, because such people are extraordinarily rare. Not rare in the way that great athletes are rare – rare in that such people typically avoid that environment, and don't do well within it.

It is worth looking carefully at the few examples we can find. What they reveal is not a wildly successful model to be copied, but a proof that principled leadership is possible. When it happens, how does it happen, and what does it cost?

Jimmy Carter is the poster child for decency in American political leadership. It's not a coincidence that he is also the poster child for what to not do in American political leadership. History has rendered him as an incompetent, a one-term cautionary tale, a colossal failure.

He personally brokered peace between Egypt and Israel, returned the Panama Canal from US control to Panama, brought human rights to the table as a top line factor in foreign policy, made the Department of Energy and the Department of Education into cabinet-level agencies, and pushed hard for energy conservation and sustainability. His post-presidential life – decades of genuine service, Habitat for Humanity, election monitoring, quiet diplomacy – is regarded with enormous warmth reflective of his own warm, genuine compassion, abundantly acted upon.

But the Iran hostage crisis (not his doing, but he didn't promptly resolve it), the Middle East oil embargo (not his doing, but he didn't promptly resolve it), "stagflation" (largely inherited from Nixon and Ford, addressed with mixed results), and his weak response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (totally on him) dominate his official legacy as president. It's fair to say that if he had been more of a power monger, and took more powerful approaches to these problems, they might have come to better conclusions. Non-power plays tend not to fair well in arenas otherwise populated by power players.

Václav Havel is in some ways even more instructive, because he was not only principled, but acutely aware of the dynamics he was operating inside of and rejected. He wrote extensively, before and during his presidency, about how power distorts the people who hold it and the institutions that channel it. He knew the trap. He stepped into it anyway, because he felt he could save his country. And he was still partially swallowed by it – not corrupted, but constrained, compromised, and worn down by the gap between what he understood and what the system would allow him to accomplish. A person who understood the problem as well as anyone alive, and still couldn't fully escape it.

There is a small cluster of stories from the business world with an important commonality: Founders who built something significant, had every opportunity to extract maximum personal wealth from it, and chose not to. The differences in these stories matter as much as the similarities.

Yvon Chouinard did not come from money. He grew up in a working-class family, taught himself blacksmithing as a teenager because he couldn't afford the climbing gear he wanted, and spent his twenties living on roughly fifty cents a day, climbing mountains and surfing. He eventually built a company organized around values he actually held, and refused at every turn to compromise those values for growth. He controlled Patagonia from its founding in 1973 until 2022 because he never took outside investment. He evaded the power gradient not by being stronger than it, but by never entering it. When he retired, he transferred ownership to a nonprofit structured to direct all profits to environmental causes – giving up approximately $3 billion dollars in personal wealth in the process. He called it "making Earth the only shareholder".

Since Chouinard stepped back, despite his outgoing arrangements, the company has begun to show ordinary corporate pressures reasserting themselves. In 2024 it told hundreds of employees to relocate or leave, citing significant overstaffing. The trust may hold the mission. It does not appear to have held the culture in the same way. This is not a surprise. It is the power gradient of corporate life doing what it does, the moment the unusually principled founder is no longer the one making the calls.

Bob Moore built Bob's Red Mill from nothing – he started the company at 49, after being a gas station owner and a J.C. Penney manager. He was driven by religious conviction about fairness, and a genuine love of whole grains. Like Chouinard, he built the company without outside shareholders. He refused repeated acquisition offers from large corporations that would have made him very wealthy. On his 81st birthday in 2010, he transferred ownership to his employees through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan, telling them they had earned it. By 2020 the company was 100% employee-owned. When Moore died in 2024 at 94, the company was thriving – 700 employee-owners, over $100 million in annual sales, products in 70 countries. His is the cleanest success story in this group, and the most replicable in structure, if not in character.

Aaron Feuerstein is the third story in this cluster, and the darkest. He did not build from scratch with the freedom to set his own terms. He inherited Malden Mills, a textile company in Massachusetts, and ran it as a conventional employer – a good one by most accounts, but inside a conventional power structure with all the pressures that entails. When the factory burned down in 1995, he kept all 3,000 employees on full payroll while rebuilding, at enormous personal cost, out of what appears to be straightforward moral conviction. He was celebrated nationally. Then largely forgotten. And then the company went bankrupt anyway. The market did not reward decency. The power gradient steamrolled over it. Feuerstein is the counter-argument to the idea that good character is enough: He was a genuinely decent person who who acted well inside a steep power structure he did not control from the ground up, and the structure made his enterprise collapse.

Moving from business to religion, Thich Nhat Hanh is not simply someone who chose a quiet life outside of power. He was a Buddhist monk in Vietnam during the war. The institutional Buddhist establishment in Vietnam, like religious institutions everywhere, had a hierarchy, and people who wanted to climb it did. Thich Nhat Hanh did not. Further, he also refused to be constrained by it.

He refused to become an instrument of the establishment, refused to take sides in the war in the way both the Buddhist hierarchy and competing political factions demanded, and he was exiled for it in 1966 – an exile that lasted 39 years. He built his influence entirely from outside any institutional support, through writing, teaching, and the community he founded at Plum Village in France. In this sense his story is closer to Carter's and Havel's than it might first appear. He too was inside a system with a pre-existing gradient. He too refused to operate within it on its terms. He too paid a real price.

The difference is that Hahn's response was to build something entirely outside the structure rather than try to reform it from within – and that the exile, however punishing, ultimately freed him to do exactly that. Chouinard's and Moore's paths bears a resemblance: Never fully inside a conventional gradient, building their own structures on their own terms from the start. The question this raises, and cannot answer, is what their examples mean for institutions that cannot be side-stepped. Countries have to be governed. Large organizations have to be led. Someone will hold the position. The question is who, and what we have built to enable and to constrain them.

Six names. That is approximately the global list for the history of the world. You may think of one or two others, and I'd be glad to hear them. But notice how hard it was to get here, the price each of them paid, the structural conditions that made their decency nearly impossible in the first place, and difficult to maintain once they personally were no longer in the driver's seat. Carter and Havel both required a specific political moment that would not have produced them in an ordinary year, and both were still ground down to dust and spit out as trash by the power gradient they entered. Chouinard and Moore both required the unusual freedom of never having to take outside investment, which is not something most founders can do. Feuerstein required nothing unusual, but in the end, he lost. Thich Nhat Hanh required being cast out of the system entirely, and building from exile. The conditions for principled leadership are, in every case, rare and costly.

Now look in the other direction. Compile a list of the kindest, most beloved rulers in history and examine it carefully. Even on this list, each entry contains a significant atrocity, either committed directly by them or occurring on their watch without serious resistance. Expand the frame to include everyone in a position of institutional authority – government officials, corporate executives, religious leaders, military commanders – and the pattern holds across every culture and every century.

So what do we do with this?

The honest answer is that there is no solution – only a practice, and it's a demanding one. Every idealistic system that has tried to reset society's values has eventually reproduced this same problem, because the problem is not ideological. It inheres in being human. We cannot natively cope with more than a few hundred people, yet we live among millions at a time. We cannot have no leadership, but we have not found a way to make durable a style of leadership that is not terrible on average.

The church no longer owns what counts as correct information, and no longer owns your salvation. Despite significant effort, the government does not control the one and only propaganda machine news outlet. Those concentrations are gone. But they have been replaced by barely broader new ones. A handful of billionaires control a handful of technology companies that control almost all of the information we encounter. Rather than optimize for trustworthy information, they optimize for stoking division ("engagement"), because we have decided as a society that money is more important than all other human needs combined, and division maximizes profit.

Now we are ready to answer what was asked above: How do we function with leadership, but with less power mongering? This is not a problem that gets solved. Like all persistent problems, it requires persistent management. We don't fix it. We refuse to stop governing it. You don't tend your garden by making one planting and digging out one weed. You tend to it day after day, season after season, year after year, or it turns into fertilizer for something that is not a garden at all.

The specific things we need to do to make it better are not mysterious. We need:

None of these are new ideas. All of them are subject to capture by the same power gradient they are meant to constrain. That is precisely why they require permanent tending rather than a one-time fix.

The power gradient will always be there. It is built into the size and complexity of the world we live in, and into the kind of animal we are. The question is not how to eliminate it but whether, at any given moment, we are making it a little better or a little worse – in the institutions we build, in the people we elevate, in the behavior we excuse, and in the moments, large and small, when we could look away and choose not to. That is the whole of the answer. It has always been the whole of the answer. It's the culture governing its productions, not the productions somehow magically doing good things on their own.